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The man is dead, yet his words live: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit "The others knew Lisp (they w

The man is dead, yet his words live: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit "The others knew Lisp (they wrote their whole site in it) and they knew Python (they rewrote their whole site in it) and yet they decided liked Python better for this project. The Python version had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain."

BeautifulSynch 2y ago
Something was bugging me about this article the first time I read it, so I made a mind map. Turns out, not once does the author actually give a reason why Python was better than Lisp for Reddit. The only references to that connection at all were claims that some “X” (all among the set that are oft-refuted by Lisp programmers) wasn’t the reason! It reads more like a PR justification (“oh, there’s not much difference really, we even asked unspecified engineers who agreed with the change, and our code is working better and better!”) than an actual explanation.
- hello_computer 2y ago
  "less code that ran faster" seems fairly clear-cut to me. Why would he lie about that?
  - BeautifulSynch 2y ago
    As I understand his claims, “less code that ran faster” was after switching from existing web frameworks to web.py, a from-scratch web framework he wrote himself to ‘do the right thing, simply’ (as all the best frameworks do). The decision to write web.py instead of web.lisp was not elaborated on, however. As mentioned above, the closest point I see to him discussing that decision is saying that ‘Python uses objects to make frameworks somewhat like the syntactic constructs Lisp allows you to make’, ie ‘you can do the same things as Lisp less easily in Python, so that’s not an advantage of Lisp’. Which is both incoherent as a refutation of the referenced reason to keep Lisp, and not a reason for the change to Python.
    - hello_computer 2y ago
      Read it again: "THE PYTHON VERSION had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain."
      - ungamedplayer 2y ago
        That's actually really direct. It appears as though they had python rewrite had more familiarity with the programmers so they had an easier time writing it. I come from the opposite side and find python syntax and style stifling.
        hello_computer 2y ago
        Instead of an ordinary blub like python, they should have doubled-down, went full-retard, and used PHP. For web work in those days, it probably would have been even faster... even easier to read and maintain.
p9fus 2y ago
Spez seems to contradict some of the claims made in that article (https://web.archive.org/web/20160803061607/http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160803061607/http://www.reddit...). for example he dosent make any claim about the python implementation being "far easier to read and maintain" (even by proxy by claiming that CL was hard to read/maintain), and honestly starts out by absolutely singing CL's praises his reasoning seems to boil more down to the ecosystem surrounding Common Lisps libraries being poorer than pythons: > If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand. [etc...] > So why Python? We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. In most cases, the Lisp code translated very easily into Python. Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn. It's been fun so far, so we'll see where it takes us.

BeautifulSynch 2y ago

Something was bugging me about this article the first time I read it, so I made a mind map. Turns out, not once does the author actually give a reason why Python was better than Lisp for Reddit. The only references to that connection at all were claims that some “X” (all among the set that are oft-refuted by Lisp programmers) wasn’t the reason! It reads more like a PR justification (“oh, there’s not much difference really, we even asked unspecified engineers who agreed with the change, and our code is working better and better!”) than an actual explanation.

hello_computer 2y ago
"less code that ran faster" seems fairly clear-cut to me. Why would he lie about that?
- BeautifulSynch 2y ago
  As I understand his claims, “less code that ran faster” was after switching from existing web frameworks to web.py, a from-scratch web framework he wrote himself to ‘do the right thing, simply’ (as all the best frameworks do). The decision to write web.py instead of web.lisp was not elaborated on, however. As mentioned above, the closest point I see to him discussing that decision is saying that ‘Python uses objects to make frameworks somewhat like the syntactic constructs Lisp allows you to make’, ie ‘you can do the same things as Lisp less easily in Python, so that’s not an advantage of Lisp’. Which is both incoherent as a refutation of the referenced reason to keep Lisp, and not a reason for the change to Python.
  - hello_computer 2y ago
    Read it again: "THE PYTHON VERSION had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain."
    - ungamedplayer 2y ago
      That's actually really direct. It appears as though they had python rewrite had more familiarity with the programmers so they had an easier time writing it. I come from the opposite side and find python syntax and style stifling.
      - hello_computer 2y ago
        Instead of an ordinary blub like python, they should have doubled-down, went full-retard, and used PHP. For web work in those days, it probably would have been even faster... even easier to read and maintain.

p9fus 2y ago

Spez seems to contradict some of the claims made in that article (https://web.archive.org/web/20160803061607/http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160803061607/http://www.reddit...). for example he dosent make any claim about the python implementation being "far easier to read and maintain" (even by proxy by claiming that CL was hard to read/maintain), and honestly starts out by absolutely singing CL's praises his reasoning seems to boil more down to the ecosystem surrounding Common Lisps libraries being poorer than pythons: > If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand. [etc...] > So why Python? We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. In most cases, the Lisp code translated very easily into Python. Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn. It's been fun so far, so we'll see where it takes us.