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This leads us to the question why HN is written in Arc. The first version of reddit has been written in Lisp, but later on they realized that Python is much eas

by blubbi2 14y ago

This leads us to the question why HN is written in Arc. The first version of reddit has been written in Lisp, but later on they realized that Python is much easier to maintain, because there are simply more Python-programmers than Lisp-geeks. HN in some way tries to emulate the early days of reddit, but now it's time to follow reddit's example and rewrite HN in a more common language.

pavelludiq 14y ago
They actually rewrote it in python because in 2003 open source implementations were of much lesser quality, also, hunchentoot didn't exist, and neither did the modern lisp frameworks like caveman/clack or restas. CCL and SBCL are way better than CMUCL and clisp, which is what I believe they used(CMUCL is barely used these days, and clisp has a bunch of rough edges and being byte compiled is slow, unlike ccl and sbcl which are pretty fast). These problems are no longer valid, and if reddit were to be written today, it would be less likely to be rewritten in python. Lisp has gone a very long way in the last 10 years. Using common lisp and restas + Postmodern(for postgreSQL access) today is actually a better choice than using something like flask or sinatra. And since i dislike full stack frameworks, my personal opinion is that it's better than django or rails too, for a small team of good hackers.
zck 14y ago
>HN in some way tries to emulate the early days of reddit, but now it's time to follow reddit's example and rewrite HN in a more common language. Why? HN isn't a startup needing to hire a bunch of people to hack on the codebase; it's a site written by Lisp experts -- in their spare time -- with, I believe, one programmer paid to hack on it. It's open-sourced in dumps, and they don't seem too interested in working with other people on it (I sent in a small patch to add quotation support to HN, and didn't hear back), as it seems to satisfy their needs. What's the benefit of rewriting?

by blubbi2 14y ago

pavelludiq 14y ago

They actually rewrote it in python because in 2003 open source implementations were of much lesser quality, also, hunchentoot didn't exist, and neither did the modern lisp frameworks like caveman/clack or restas. CCL and SBCL are way better than CMUCL and clisp, which is what I believe they used(CMUCL is barely used these days, and clisp has a bunch of rough edges and being byte compiled is slow, unlike ccl and sbcl which are pretty fast). These problems are no longer valid, and if reddit were to be written today, it would be less likely to be rewritten in python. Lisp has gone a very long way in the last 10 years. Using common lisp and restas + Postmodern(for postgreSQL access) today is actually a better choice than using something like flask or sinatra. And since i dislike full stack frameworks, my personal opinion is that it's better than django or rails too, for a small team of good hackers.

zck 14y ago

>HN in some way tries to emulate the early days of reddit, but now it's time to follow reddit's example and rewrite HN in a more common language. Why? HN isn't a startup needing to hire a bunch of people to hack on the codebase; it's a site written by Lisp experts -- in their spare time -- with, I believe, one programmer paid to hack on it. It's open-sourced in dumps, and they don't seem too interested in working with other people on it (I sent in a small patch to add quotation support to HN, and didn't hear back), as it seems to satisfy their needs. What's the benefit of rewriting?