6 ms·

Any major websites done on Lisp, Smalltalk or Haskell? Besides Viaweb? Now count > 1m visits per day websites done in PHP.

by batista 14y ago

kintamanimatt 14y ago
You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users). There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes. You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success. It's like comparing the number of millionaires in the US with the number of millionaires in Canada; the US has a bigger population compared to Canada, and all things being more or less equal, it's reasonable to expect that the US would have more millionaires simply because of its shear size.
- batista 14y ago
  >You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. Yes, me and all Analytics and SEO guys. You either sell ads or stuff. In both cases you want as many eyeballs and wallets as possible. >The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users). There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes. Yes, but your logic is circular. The question is WHY are there "more websites with foundations in PHP", and not just trivial amateur personal stuff but highly successful ones too. You seem to assume PHPs expanse as just a fact of life, totally arbitrary, and thats why you say we must not draw conclusions based on it. >You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success. Sure I can. Here are some ways: - Php is easy for newstarters, so got more adoption. - Php is trivial to deploy, so got more adoption. - Php was there, targetting the web specifically (with libs and features), in 199x, while Haskell, CL, what have you were not yet. - Php, because of the above, had amassed a huge ecosystem of projects and engines (Nuke, Wordpress, Drupal, EE, etc). - Php, because of that, has alo got huge adoption. - Because of th adoption it built a huge ecosystem of programmers, projects, tools, books, etc. And, putting it all together, what makes PHP more likely to power most high ranking sites, is that you can easily find components and engines to base your site on, AND you can easily find tons of programmers to employ, AND you can easily find support for it, etc. All those make it a no brainer for a lot of uses. And all of those are interdependent, based on some initial language attributes, not arbitrary like the US vs Canada population argument (which is not that arbitrary and size based itself, but thats another story)
  - kintamanimatt 14y ago
    > You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. I wasn't disagreeing, and in fact I didn't even express an opinion regarding this. Success means a lot of different things to people; I was stating your definition of success for clarity. The user doesn't care whether I write a website's back end in PHP, Ruby, Python, Haskell, C++, Ada, Clojure, or even Erlang. The success depends on how useful the site is and how well it's marketed. This isn't circular reasoning. There are more websites written in PHP because PHP is an easy language for beginners and therefore more common compared to Ruby or Python, for example. It's an absolutely untenable position to assert that the programming language itself affects how much traffic an site receives, which is what you originally defined as "success".
    - batista 14y ago
      >I wasn't disagreeing, and in fact I didn't even express an opinion regarding this. Success means a lot of different things to people; I was stating your definition of success for clarity. Oh, alright. Thought you meant it was not a good metric. >The user doesn't care whether I write a website's back end in PHP, Ruby, Python, Haskell, C++, Ada, Clojure, or even Erlang. The success depends on how useful the site is and how well it's marketed. This isn't circular reasoning. There are more websites written in PHP because PHP is an easy language for beginners and therefore more common compared to Ruby or Python, for example. Yes, that second argument is not circular reasoning because it searches for the causes. But the argument in your previous post, I read it as: "PHP is used by more of the popular sites because PHP is used by more sites in general" Which is kinda circular, mostly repeating "PHP is popular". >It's an absolutely untenable position to assert that the programming language itself affects how much traffic an site receives, which is what you originally defined as "success". I did the opposite: the success of the site affects the programming language. That is, I am a pragmatist: I see every successful site built with a programming language as one more verification that said language is good for building sites with (whatever the reasons). If we have 200,000 high volume sites in PHP and 0 in X, as a pragmatist, I will avoid using X in my next high volume site project. Working from that, one can also see why it is so. For example: 1) it's because X is obscure, so I wouldn't be able to get a team easily. Perhaps even no one in my city, at least without adding the overhead of teaching them X first. 2) it's because X is more expensive to host. I'll need to get a VPS whereas I can just put PHP on a $10/year server. 3) it's because PHP has more libs and stuff. This DB/service API/etc I want to use does not have X drivers (or has a semi-abandoned project). 4) it's because PHP has Drupal/Wordpress and I can have a high traffic portal/news style site in minutes, whereas X has only ho-hum solutions for that, or I would have to build one from scratch. and so on. Surprisingly, many so called "scientists" and "engineers" choose to argue from first principles. "X is a bona fide academic language, and has all those meta programming features, higher-order types and such, so you are crazy to use PHP over X for your project". So, instead of reading the situation pragmatically, and finding the real pain points PHP eases and why it's used, they resort to idealistic rants about how masses are ignorant, "beating the averages", etc etc. Well, this Zuckerberg guy, with his average PHP, beat Viaweb's Lisp by about 100x better valuation. If, according to "beating the averages", ViaWeb's success was a pro-Lisp point, why isn't that a pro-PHP point? Or does it only work when Lisp wins (as in, "ViaWeb won because of Lisp but Facebook won despite of PHP"). Talk about having it both ways!
anonymoushn 14y ago
> Any major websites done on Lisp Does Hacker News count?
- batista 14y ago
  Note the use of the word "major"
  - xyzzyz 14y ago
    Note the use of "true" in "no true Scotsman".
    - batista 14y ago
      Note that I specifically wrote >1m visits per day. Note also that the mention of one site is too literal and meaningless interpretation of my question, which is more rhetorical, and should be read like: "There are TONS of high volume PHP sites and very very very few high volume Lisp sites". That said: the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy is only a fallacy half of the time, like most of those so-called logical fallacies. They assume a perfectly logical world, where you have infinite information at your disposal and infinite time to check it. E.g I'd rather listen to my doctor on my medical condition over a random guy on the subway, even if that's "appeal to authority". Similar cracks in the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. There ARE cases where a category/taxonomy is used badly, and no true member of said taxonomy would so something. That is, membership in a taxonomy is not always 100% solid, and you can have true and less true (fuzzy) membership. E.g - No KKK member would attend a NWA concert. - But I just saw a KKK member rocking it at a NWA concert. - Well, no _TRUE KKK member_ would ever attend one. It's obvious that the first guy is correct: no TRUE KKK would ever attend a NWA concert. Now, a random KKK member could possibly attend one (say, out of curiosity). The "no TRUE" argument in this case, says not so much the impossibility of an event happening, but that it is against the very concept of the taxonomy under discussion for it to happen. Hackers shouldn't touch the "logical fallacy" stuff with a ten foot pole. They presuppose that conversations and argumentation can just go "by numbers", without examining each individual case.
greyfade 14y ago
Amazon.com was famously put together by mostly Lisp engineers. They more recently switched to C++ and apparently experienced a lot of growing pains as they had to learn how to scale up C++ to match what they had been doing in Lisp for years.

Any major websites done on Lisp, Smalltalk or Haskell? Besides Viaweb? Now count > 1m visits per day websites done in PHP.

by batista 14y ago

Any major websites done on Lisp, Smalltalk or Haskell? Besides Viaweb? Now count > 1m visits per day websites done in PHP.

kintamanimatt 14y ago

You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users). There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes. You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success. It's like comparing the number of millionaires in the US with the number of millionaires in Canada; the US has a bigger population compared to Canada, and all things being more or less equal, it's reasonable to expect that the US would have more millionaires simply because of its shear size.

batista 14y ago
>You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. Yes, me and all Analytics and SEO guys. You either sell ads or stuff. In both cases you want as many eyeballs and wallets as possible. >The number of hits a website receives isn't the product of the language it's written in, but primarily a function of its marketing (and other factors that appeal to its users). There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes. Yes, but your logic is circular. The question is WHY are there "more websites with foundations in PHP", and not just trivial amateur personal stuff but highly successful ones too. You seem to assume PHPs expanse as just a fact of life, totally arbitrary, and thats why you say we must not draw conclusions based on it. >You can't therefore logically conclude that the language influences success. Sure I can. Here are some ways: - Php is easy for newstarters, so got more adoption. - Php is trivial to deploy, so got more adoption. - Php was there, targetting the web specifically (with libs and features), in 199x, while Haskell, CL, what have you were not yet. - Php, because of the above, had amassed a huge ecosystem of projects and engines (Nuke, Wordpress, Drupal, EE, etc). - Php, because of that, has alo got huge adoption. - Because of th adoption it built a huge ecosystem of programmers, projects, tools, books, etc. And, putting it all together, what makes PHP more likely to power most high ranking sites, is that you can easily find components and engines to base your site on, AND you can easily find tons of programmers to employ, AND you can easily find support for it, etc. All those make it a no brainer for a lot of uses. And all of those are interdependent, based on some initial language attributes, not arbitrary like the US vs Canada population argument (which is not that arbitrary and size based itself, but thats another story)
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  > You're measuring the success of a website in terms of traffic. I wasn't disagreeing, and in fact I didn't even express an opinion regarding this. Success means a lot of different things to people; I was stating your definition of success for clarity. The user doesn't care whether I write a website's back end in PHP, Ruby, Python, Haskell, C++, Ada, Clojure, or even Erlang. The success depends on how useful the site is and how well it's marketed. This isn't circular reasoning. There are more websites written in PHP because PHP is an easy language for beginners and therefore more common compared to Ruby or Python, for example. It's an absolutely untenable position to assert that the programming language itself affects how much traffic an site receives, which is what you originally defined as "success".
  - batista 14y ago
    >I wasn't disagreeing, and in fact I didn't even express an opinion regarding this. Success means a lot of different things to people; I was stating your definition of success for clarity. Oh, alright. Thought you meant it was not a good metric. >The user doesn't care whether I write a website's back end in PHP, Ruby, Python, Haskell, C++, Ada, Clojure, or even Erlang. The success depends on how useful the site is and how well it's marketed. This isn't circular reasoning. There are more websites written in PHP because PHP is an easy language for beginners and therefore more common compared to Ruby or Python, for example. Yes, that second argument is not circular reasoning because it searches for the causes. But the argument in your previous post, I read it as: "PHP is used by more of the popular sites because PHP is used by more sites in general" Which is kinda circular, mostly repeating "PHP is popular". >It's an absolutely untenable position to assert that the programming language itself affects how much traffic an site receives, which is what you originally defined as "success". I did the opposite: the success of the site affects the programming language. That is, I am a pragmatist: I see every successful site built with a programming language as one more verification that said language is good for building sites with (whatever the reasons). If we have 200,000 high volume sites in PHP and 0 in X, as a pragmatist, I will avoid using X in my next high volume site project. Working from that, one can also see why it is so. For example: 1) it's because X is obscure, so I wouldn't be able to get a team easily. Perhaps even no one in my city, at least without adding the overhead of teaching them X first. 2) it's because X is more expensive to host. I'll need to get a VPS whereas I can just put PHP on a $10/year server. 3) it's because PHP has more libs and stuff. This DB/service API/etc I want to use does not have X drivers (or has a semi-abandoned project). 4) it's because PHP has Drupal/Wordpress and I can have a high traffic portal/news style site in minutes, whereas X has only ho-hum solutions for that, or I would have to build one from scratch. and so on. Surprisingly, many so called "scientists" and "engineers" choose to argue from first principles. "X is a bona fide academic language, and has all those meta programming features, higher-order types and such, so you are crazy to use PHP over X for your project". So, instead of reading the situation pragmatically, and finding the real pain points PHP eases and why it's used, they resort to idealistic rants about how masses are ignorant, "beating the averages", etc etc. Well, this Zuckerberg guy, with his average PHP, beat Viaweb's Lisp by about 100x better valuation. If, according to "beating the averages", ViaWeb's success was a pro-Lisp point, why isn't that a pro-PHP point? Or does it only work when Lisp wins (as in, "ViaWeb won because of Lisp but Facebook won despite of PHP"). Talk about having it both ways!

anonymoushn 14y ago

> Any major websites done on Lisp Does Hacker News count?

batista 14y ago
Note the use of the word "major"
- xyzzyz 14y ago
  Note the use of "true" in "no true Scotsman".
  - batista 14y ago
    Note that I specifically wrote >1m visits per day. Note also that the mention of one site is too literal and meaningless interpretation of my question, which is more rhetorical, and should be read like: "There are TONS of high volume PHP sites and very very very few high volume Lisp sites". That said: the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy is only a fallacy half of the time, like most of those so-called logical fallacies. They assume a perfectly logical world, where you have infinite information at your disposal and infinite time to check it. E.g I'd rather listen to my doctor on my medical condition over a random guy on the subway, even if that's "appeal to authority". Similar cracks in the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. There ARE cases where a category/taxonomy is used badly, and no true member of said taxonomy would so something. That is, membership in a taxonomy is not always 100% solid, and you can have true and less true (fuzzy) membership. E.g - No KKK member would attend a NWA concert. - But I just saw a KKK member rocking it at a NWA concert. - Well, no _TRUE KKK member_ would ever attend one. It's obvious that the first guy is correct: no TRUE KKK would ever attend a NWA concert. Now, a random KKK member could possibly attend one (say, out of curiosity). The "no TRUE" argument in this case, says not so much the impossibility of an event happening, but that it is against the very concept of the taxonomy under discussion for it to happen. Hackers shouldn't touch the "logical fallacy" stuff with a ten foot pole. They presuppose that conversations and argumentation can just go "by numbers", without examining each individual case.

greyfade 14y ago

Amazon.com was famously put together by mostly Lisp engineers. They more recently switched to C++ and apparently experienced a lot of growing pains as they had to learn how to scale up C++ to match what they had been doing in Lisp for years.