24 ms·

Rewriting Reddit (2005)

345 points by amalantony06 12y ago

linuxydave 12y ago
Whatever happened to that Lisp clone?
- mineshaftgap 12y ago
  It must be around here somewhere.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  <joke> Likely consumed by meta-patterns, like every other project who's primary reason to exist is to be a LISP clone of something.
- bhhaskin 12y ago
  I wounder...
- swartkrans 12y ago
  I'm not sure if linuxydave is joking, but for those not in on the joke, Hacker News is written in arc, a Lisp variant. Hacker News resembles early versions of reddit quite a bit and Reddit was a ycombinator funded startup. Early on there was a big overlap in the two communities, although Hacker News was quite a bit more exclusive and limited in scope.
  - 27182818284 12y ago
    I knew HN was written in Arc, but I wasn't aware that it is the Lisp clone referred to by this piece. Was it?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - nocman 12y ago
      When he said "Whatever happened to that Lisp clone?" I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp. The discussion was not about writing a new Lisp or Lisp-like language, but a clone of Reddit. The fact that HN is a site that performs a function very similar to Reddit, and happens to be written in a dialect of Lisp is completely coincidental :-D (unless there has been some comment by pg about his motivations for making HN that I missed, but I kind of doubt it).
      - linuxydave 12y ago
        >I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp. Yep, spot-on. It's the same with those guys who wanted to make a Facebook clone focused on privacy or whatever. Lots of talk and then you never hear about the project again.
        ryanfreeborn 12y ago
        You mean Diaspora? (or maybe there's another clone I missed out on). The founder of Diaspora committed suicide. I think the project mostly died with him.
        dbdr 12y ago
        Wow, I didn't know about this suicide :( Is the project really dead though? I have no personal experience, but these stats show a growing number of active users: http://pods.jasonrobinson.me/ http://pods.jasonrobinson.me/
        ryanfreeborn 12y ago
        Oh interesting. I didn't know it was still moving along. It had a lot of momentum a few years back, but hasn't been making nearly as much noise since. Not sure if the founder's suicide actually correlated with the dropoff in media attention.
geerlingguy 12y ago
Just wondering (as someone who only uses/touches Python indirectly, through some projects that use it, but is not currently a 'Python developer' by any means); was this posted in response to some recent drama in the Django community, or as an argument against Lisp? I'm just wondering why it seems this story is quickly getting upvoted on the front page of HN, when it seems there are no other frontpage stories remotely related to Django, Reddit, or Lisp?
- rrradical 12y ago
  I upvoted just because it's a neat, historical document that I missed the first time around. I have no particular stake in Lisp or Python.
  - bhhaskin 12y ago
    Yep, I knew that Reddit was originally written in Lisp and made the change to Python at some point. It is neat to learn exactly why and how.
    - general_failure 12y ago
      What did you learn? That lisp is not maintainable? The article just glosses over the details.
- p4bl0 12y ago
  > when it seems there are no other frontpage stories remotely related to Django, Reddit, or Lisp That may be true about Django, but not the other two. Reddit being a YC-backed company, it always has been a hot topic here on HN. Maybe less now than a few years back but the same HNers are still here. And as for Lisp, it has always been a hot topic on HN too. Many people know HN via PG who they discovered for his Lisp writings. HN is itself written in a Lisp dialect. And Lisp related stories appear monthly on the frontpage, maybe weekly if we take all Scheme and Emacs related links into account. Just take a look at the search results for the past week with any Lisp related keyword.
- erkose 12y ago
mikepurvis 12y ago
Note that reddit has rewritten at least once since the web.py rewrite. cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51078 I recall reading a more scathing post from spez at one point about frustrations with web.py, but I don't seem to see it now. It may have been removed. In any case, Flask seems to be the inheritor of the "write webapps in Python" description.
- thearn4 12y ago
  > In any case, Flask seems to be the inheritor of the "write webapps in Python" description. Flask definitely fills that role for me. It's very simple to get up and going with it, and deploys easily.
  - thalesfc 12y ago
    Me too. This post is making me so happy to see that others like Flask as I do. :)
mox1 12y ago
web.py is still my go to for lightweight webapps. I won't start a big discourse on the pros and cons vs. other technologies, but I will say it is incredibly easy to setup and use. The current github page is here: https://github.com/webpy/webpy https://github.com/webpy/webpy If you are looking to get up and running quickly, I would recommend forking this skeleton: https://github.com/jzellman/webpy-skeleton https://github.com/jzellman/webpy-skeleton Finally, the built in database framework is a bit simplistic. I like to pair this with Peewee (included in the webpy-skeleton).
- rdtsc 12y ago
  Yeah same here. It has the cleanest mapping from REST resources to Python class + method. It just made sense to me: The router block at the top plus: class MyResource: def GET(self,...): ... def POST(self,...): ... def PUT(self,...): ... def DELETE(self,...): ... Looks really nice. Haven't tried serving or rendering templates from it, so never tested that code.
  - tiglionabbit 12y ago
    Check out Flask's MethodView
    - rdtsc 12y ago
      Oh Cool. Hadn't seen that before. I like MethodView dispatch pattern.
  - euphemize 12y ago
    FWIW, many other python web frameworks use the very same pattern.
jedberg 12y ago
web.py never really worked well, so we ended up rewriting it again. The interesting thing was that Django still wasn't up to the task when we did that, mostly because it's templating engine was too slow. So we chose Pylons instead. It should be noted that Django has since fixed that issue.
- swartkrans 12y ago
  Was there one specific problem with web.py or multiple issues? Was there ever a write up about what you guys learned from trying web.py? Would be an interesting read.
  - jedberg 12y ago
    Keysersosa answered this better below, but basically maintainability. There was no writeup, I guess because doing write-ups about internal software switches wasn't really a thing back then. :)
    - keysersosa 12y ago
      Yeah I think that post dates from a time where you still heard people refer to them as "weblogs". Edit: Found it. It was the 14th post on our blog a time, but definitely light on the implementation details. http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html
      - jedberg 12y ago
        I think OP meant a writeup about the switch from web.py to Pylons. I'm not sure we ever wrote that one down.
        keysersosa 12y ago
        Point! I think I found it http://www.redditblog.com/2007/08/its-slow-its-unstable-its-beta.html http://www.redditblog.com/2007/08/its-slow-its-unstable-its-... Also just as anemic as the last one. Oh well.
euphemize 12y ago
Used Tornado, django and flask quite a bit, web.py only once. As others have mentioned, it didn't work that well, and the community around it is smaller than other frameworks. Again today, Django seems a bit cumbersome, Tornado works well but has a very low bus factor. Pretty sure flask is currently the front runner in "python microframeworks".
- thalesfc 12y ago
  Flask has my preference 2. I was wondering what was reddit's folks opinion for flask.
  - NSCFType 12y ago
    Flask (2010) wasn't around when reddit was (re)written (2005).
- gsk 12y ago
  What's bus factor?
  - jms18 12y ago
    If the author got hit by a bus, there's no one else around to maintain it. Generally refers to "how many people can continue to develop/support this software if original maintainer (and close co-developers) get hit by a bus."
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > What's bus factor? The number of developers that can be suddenly and totally lost from a project (e.g., by being hit by a bus) without the project itself becoming unable to proceed effectively.
joesmo 12y ago
I think you can leverage these criticisms at about 90% of the framework software out there written in just about any language. Most developers like to create complex, complicated software mainly to show off their "cleverness" without thinking through the implications for the people that have to use it. It's as if they think that by cramming in every design pattern they can think of and using many different libraries together for no perceptible reason makes the software better when they could've achieved the same thing much more simply and cleanly if they had put a little thought into it. Such over-engineering is equally a problem as the spaghetti code of programmers who don't know better.
- sbilstein 12y ago
  I'm not too familiar with Django but with several other frameworks and I definitely feel like this applies to lots of them out there. In my experience though, I've worked on teams with developers who criticize frameworks for those reasons, choose a minimal or no framework at all, and spend a ton of extra, unnecessary time reinventing a worse version of a framework they decided 'sucked' once they realize they need security, error handling, form processing, an ORM etc... Over-engineering is an epidemic.
  - LeafStorm 12y ago
    I almost went down this route on a project once. As soon as I noticed myself writing an identity map, I slapped myself in the face and just downloaded Symfony.
    - girvo 12y ago
      Funnily, this is the reason I adore Slim so much. In the PHP world, it gives me exactly what I require in a framework, and nothing else. Slapping it on top of a well-defined class heirachy becomes a simple exercise. I like it so much, that I'm porting it to Hack/HHVM[0]! [0] http://github.com/LeanFramework/Lean http://github.com/LeanFramework/Lean
    - Gigablah 12y ago
      Symfony is awesome but I feel they try to stuff too much into the default framework configuration. I don't want all those silly annotations, for example.
temuze 12y ago
The first Python web framework I used was Django. I'm really glad I came across it first because I was inexperienced at the time and it forced me to adopt a lot of good practices. However, now that I'm more experienced, I can relate a little to what Aaron is saying here. Learning all of this boilerplate stuff is annoying! Recently, I started contributing to a friend's rails app and I found the process of learning how to use each separate little tool tiresome. This is why I like Pyramid - it starts off dirt simple. Hello World is almost as short in Pyramid as it is in Flask. As you grow, you can start organizing and adding different things as you need them. It has absolutely 0 magic. I find Pyramid to be a happy medium between Flask's minimalism and Django's extensibility.
- Yuioup 12y ago
  I wonder. How popular is Pyramid? I ask because I found Pyramid to be quite intimidating the first time (I'm not an exprienced Python developer). It took me four attempts to finally 'get' it - the first three times giving up in frustration and leaving it alone for 2-3 months before trying again. Now that I get it though, it seems like an interesting framework but not a productive one. I've only dabbled in Pyramid with my free time and have never built a serious project with it, but I can't imagine building anything large scale with it. (I'm a .NET developer BTW, MVC is what I work with in my day job)
  - achillean 12y ago
    Shodan is a decently-sized website and runs on Pyramid (https://www.shodan.io https://www.shodan.io). I don't know how popular it is in the general Python community, but it's been amazing to work with as a framework.
  - sontek 12y ago
    We (https://www.surveymonkey.com/ https://www.surveymonkey.com/) use it for all our services. I can't imagine using another framework! Pyramid is great for what we do. I also know http://www.cars.com/ http://www.cars.com/ is heavily powered by Pyramid.
- dangayle 12y ago
gprasant 12y ago
They say hell hath no fury like a lisp fan scorned. I wonder if they hadn't been acquired, would they have still used Lisp ?
- bensw 12y ago
  This blog post refers to a rewrite that happened before the Condé Nast acquisition.
- keysersosa 12y ago
  We switched to python about 4 months into the startup and a full year before getting acquired.
  - raldi 12y ago
    And some people still haven't forgiven you.
  - zoomerang 12y ago
    I can remember this switch back in the day, but for some reason my memory has failed me. I could have sworn the original was in Haskell, not Lisp. Selective memory I guess.
- alexis 12y ago
  Great post on that when Steve made the switch. http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html
andyzweb 12y ago
RIP Aaron ;_;
general_failure 12y ago
Is reddit that simple to rewrite over the weekend?
- wcummings 12y ago
  In 2005, very probably
  - keysersosa 12y ago
    Yup that was the case. Though, I believe it was also a long weekend -- I think it might have been Veteran's day because I remember putting the finishing touches on it around Thanksgiving.
wcummings 12y ago
What Lisp webserver was used, originally? Hunchentoot? What web servers/stack are Lispers using these days?
- keysersosa 12y ago
  At the time it was "TBNL" (http://weitz.de/tbnl/ http://weitz.de/tbnl/), which I believe has indeed evolved into Hunchentoot.
- elwell 12y ago
  > What web servers/stack are Lispers using these days? If you're using Clojure, ring + tomcat, etc...
- eudox 12y ago
  >What web servers/stack are Lispers using these days? Clack (https://github.com/fukamachi/clack https://github.com/fukamachi/clack)
- orthecreedence 12y ago
  I use Wookie a lot (http://wookie.lyonbros.com/ http://wookie.lyonbros.com/) but I'm biased because I built it. It's a non-blocking CL app server.
_stem 12y ago
For all people still thinking that Django is not "lean" or flexible enough for their next project, let me just leave this here: https://speakerdeck.com/mstepniowski/django-best-python-micro-web-framework https://speakerdeck.com/mstepniowski/django-best-python-micr... A single-file web application in Django: https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/polls.py https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/poll...
- keysersosa 12y ago
  Yeah it should be noted that all of the referenced decisions we made around web frameworks in this thread predate django's 1.0 release. I think I was comparing pylons to django 0.96 iirc, and in 2005 when aaron wrote web.py, I don't think django was on anybody's radar (or at least it wasn't on ours). Django has definitely come a long way!
- INTPenis 12y ago
  >A single-file web application in Django: https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/poll.. https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/poll.... That still looks very complicated compared to most microframeworks I've used, including web.py. And all that django-specific logic that needs to be in there makes it harder to read unless you're familiar with the django ecosystem.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >And all that django-specific logic that needs to be in there makes it harder to read unless you're familiar with the django ecosystem. What "django-specific" logic? Those are standard imports and a few helper objects, the kind of which you'll find in any web framework. [edit: importants => imports]
    - INTPenis 12y ago
      I've been using flask lately and I could compress four of those imports into one import in flask. And the settings aren't even necessary. All these things, when compared to a true microframework, contribute in legibility of the code.
pshc 12y ago
We currently use web.py + gevent to run our API where I work. It's really easy to work with since it's so tiny and simple, and since we only need JSON in and out for now, it's perfectly sufficient. Before web.py, we were on a scary Tornado implementation. The API was rewritten to web.py in a week with a minimal delta. We won't be on web.py forever, and gevent sometimes kicks up minor fusses, but I think web.py has given us a nice malleable form that helped us get out of a terrible place, and we can easily hop off once we decide where we want to be. RIP aaronsw.
- quasse 12y ago
  I'm not very familiar with Tornado (we've switched to mostly Flask now) but I'd be interested to know what kinds of problems cropped up that lead you to switch to web.py
  - pshc 12y ago
    Tornado requires asynchronous I/O. Almost all of the existing I/O was done synchronously. Yeah.
tim333 12y ago
For another take on the Reddit rewrite from Steve Huffman see: http://www.pyvideo.org/video/234/pycon-2009--keynote--reddit--steve-huffman-and-al http://www.pyvideo.org/video/234/pycon-2009--keynote--reddit... 25m 40s
gcb0 12y ago
> "It means readable HTML with the proper HTTP headers." said all the other frameworks's authors a few months before him that are now churning out deprecated headers just like that one will in a couple months, while gallantly trying to protect the user from handling headers.
- voltagex_ 12y ago
  Huh?
menriquez 12y ago
" Another concluded: “some vc suit wants a maintainable-by-joe-programmer product. I hope he pays you millions.”" so this guy is implying that we should be choosing our programming languages based on how hard and expensive it will be to get other dev's to work on it? that is the most economically unsound and elitist thing i've heard recently.
83457 12y ago
Would clojure fare better now?
closetnerd 12y ago
Its incredible how intelligent this kid was.
- ocb 12y ago
  Just 19 when he wrote this!
coldtea 12y ago
>The Lisp newsgroup, comp.lang.lisp, was upset about the switch that they’re currently planning to write a competitor to reddit in Lisp, to show how right they are or something. That must have ended as a huge success, because as we all know the important thing behind a website is the backend language...
- Perceval 12y ago
  Isn't Hacker News written in Lisp?
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    I think you miss the point of the parent comment, which is that backend language is an implementation detail and generally shouldn't matter to users. You can disagree with that point, it just is a very different point than anything addressed by noting that HN has a Lisp backend.
rpdillon 12y ago
I've used CherryPy on a number of projects, and I really like it, but rarely see it mentioned in discussions of Python web programming. It's light and minimal, and seems equally deft for writing APIs as conventional web page driven apps. Flask is mentioned all the time, however. Does anyone have insight into the popularity of Flask vs. CherryPy?

345 points by amalantony06 12y ago

linuxydave 12y ago

Whatever happened to that Lisp clone?

mineshaftgap 12y ago
It must be around here somewhere.
valarauca1 12y ago
<joke> Likely consumed by meta-patterns, like every other project who's primary reason to exist is to be a LISP clone of something.
bhhaskin 12y ago
I wounder...
swartkrans 12y ago
I'm not sure if linuxydave is joking, but for those not in on the joke, Hacker News is written in arc, a Lisp variant. Hacker News resembles early versions of reddit quite a bit and Reddit was a ycombinator funded startup. Early on there was a big overlap in the two communities, although Hacker News was quite a bit more exclusive and limited in scope.
- 27182818284 12y ago
  I knew HN was written in Arc, but I wasn't aware that it is the Lisp clone referred to by this piece. Was it?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - nocman 12y ago
    When he said "Whatever happened to that Lisp clone?" I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp. The discussion was not about writing a new Lisp or Lisp-like language, but a clone of Reddit. The fact that HN is a site that performs a function very similar to Reddit, and happens to be written in a dialect of Lisp is completely coincidental :-D (unless there has been some comment by pg about his motivations for making HN that I missed, but I kind of doubt it).
    - linuxydave 12y ago
      >I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp. Yep, spot-on. It's the same with those guys who wanted to make a Facebook clone focused on privacy or whatever. Lots of talk and then you never hear about the project again.
      - ryanfreeborn 12y ago
        You mean Diaspora? (or maybe there's another clone I missed out on). The founder of Diaspora committed suicide. I think the project mostly died with him.
        dbdr 12y ago
        Wow, I didn't know about this suicide :( Is the project really dead though? I have no personal experience, but these stats show a growing number of active users: http://pods.jasonrobinson.me/ http://pods.jasonrobinson.me/
        ryanfreeborn 12y ago
        Oh interesting. I didn't know it was still moving along. It had a lot of momentum a few years back, but hasn't been making nearly as much noise since. Not sure if the founder's suicide actually correlated with the dropoff in media attention.

geerlingguy 12y ago

Just wondering (as someone who only uses/touches Python indirectly, through some projects that use it, but is not currently a 'Python developer' by any means); was this posted in response to some recent drama in the Django community, or as an argument against Lisp? I'm just wondering why it seems this story is quickly getting upvoted on the front page of HN, when it seems there are no other frontpage stories remotely related to Django, Reddit, or Lisp?

rrradical 12y ago
I upvoted just because it's a neat, historical document that I missed the first time around. I have no particular stake in Lisp or Python.
- bhhaskin 12y ago
  Yep, I knew that Reddit was originally written in Lisp and made the change to Python at some point. It is neat to learn exactly why and how.
  - general_failure 12y ago
    What did you learn? That lisp is not maintainable? The article just glosses over the details.
p4bl0 12y ago
> when it seems there are no other frontpage stories remotely related to Django, Reddit, or Lisp That may be true about Django, but not the other two. Reddit being a YC-backed company, it always has been a hot topic here on HN. Maybe less now than a few years back but the same HNers are still here. And as for Lisp, it has always been a hot topic on HN too. Many people know HN via PG who they discovered for his Lisp writings. HN is itself written in a Lisp dialect. And Lisp related stories appear monthly on the frontpage, maybe weekly if we take all Scheme and Emacs related links into account. Just take a look at the search results for the past week with any Lisp related keyword.
erkose 12y ago

mikepurvis 12y ago

Note that reddit has rewritten at least once since the web.py rewrite. cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51078 I recall reading a more scathing post from spez at one point about frustrations with web.py, but I don't seem to see it now. It may have been removed. In any case, Flask seems to be the inheritor of the "write webapps in Python" description.

thearn4 12y ago
> In any case, Flask seems to be the inheritor of the "write webapps in Python" description. Flask definitely fills that role for me. It's very simple to get up and going with it, and deploys easily.
- thalesfc 12y ago
  Me too. This post is making me so happy to see that others like Flask as I do. :)

mox1 12y ago

web.py is still my go to for lightweight webapps. I won't start a big discourse on the pros and cons vs. other technologies, but I will say it is incredibly easy to setup and use. The current github page is here: https://github.com/webpy/webpy https://github.com/webpy/webpy If you are looking to get up and running quickly, I would recommend forking this skeleton: https://github.com/jzellman/webpy-skeleton https://github.com/jzellman/webpy-skeleton Finally, the built in database framework is a bit simplistic. I like to pair this with Peewee (included in the webpy-skeleton).

rdtsc 12y ago
Yeah same here. It has the cleanest mapping from REST resources to Python class + method. It just made sense to me: The router block at the top plus: class MyResource: def GET(self,...): ... def POST(self,...): ... def PUT(self,...): ... def DELETE(self,...): ... Looks really nice. Haven't tried serving or rendering templates from it, so never tested that code.
- tiglionabbit 12y ago
  Check out Flask's MethodView
  - rdtsc 12y ago
    Oh Cool. Hadn't seen that before. I like MethodView dispatch pattern.
- euphemize 12y ago
  FWIW, many other python web frameworks use the very same pattern.

jedberg 12y ago

web.py never really worked well, so we ended up rewriting it again. The interesting thing was that Django still wasn't up to the task when we did that, mostly because it's templating engine was too slow. So we chose Pylons instead. It should be noted that Django has since fixed that issue.

swartkrans 12y ago
Was there one specific problem with web.py or multiple issues? Was there ever a write up about what you guys learned from trying web.py? Would be an interesting read.
- jedberg 12y ago
  Keysersosa answered this better below, but basically maintainability. There was no writeup, I guess because doing write-ups about internal software switches wasn't really a thing back then. :)
  - keysersosa 12y ago
    Yeah I think that post dates from a time where you still heard people refer to them as "weblogs". Edit: Found it. It was the 14th post on our blog a time, but definitely light on the implementation details. http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html
    - jedberg 12y ago
      I think OP meant a writeup about the switch from web.py to Pylons. I'm not sure we ever wrote that one down.
      - keysersosa 12y ago
        Point! I think I found it http://www.redditblog.com/2007/08/its-slow-its-unstable-its-beta.html http://www.redditblog.com/2007/08/its-slow-its-unstable-its-... Also just as anemic as the last one. Oh well.

euphemize 12y ago

Used Tornado, django and flask quite a bit, web.py only once. As others have mentioned, it didn't work that well, and the community around it is smaller than other frameworks. Again today, Django seems a bit cumbersome, Tornado works well but has a very low bus factor. Pretty sure flask is currently the front runner in "python microframeworks".

thalesfc 12y ago
Flask has my preference 2. I was wondering what was reddit's folks opinion for flask.
- NSCFType 12y ago
  Flask (2010) wasn't around when reddit was (re)written (2005).
gsk 12y ago
What's bus factor?
- jms18 12y ago
  If the author got hit by a bus, there's no one else around to maintain it. Generally refers to "how many people can continue to develop/support this software if original maintainer (and close co-developers) get hit by a bus."
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > What's bus factor? The number of developers that can be suddenly and totally lost from a project (e.g., by being hit by a bus) without the project itself becoming unable to proceed effectively.

joesmo 12y ago

I think you can leverage these criticisms at about 90% of the framework software out there written in just about any language. Most developers like to create complex, complicated software mainly to show off their "cleverness" without thinking through the implications for the people that have to use it. It's as if they think that by cramming in every design pattern they can think of and using many different libraries together for no perceptible reason makes the software better when they could've achieved the same thing much more simply and cleanly if they had put a little thought into it. Such over-engineering is equally a problem as the spaghetti code of programmers who don't know better.

sbilstein 12y ago
I'm not too familiar with Django but with several other frameworks and I definitely feel like this applies to lots of them out there. In my experience though, I've worked on teams with developers who criticize frameworks for those reasons, choose a minimal or no framework at all, and spend a ton of extra, unnecessary time reinventing a worse version of a framework they decided 'sucked' once they realize they need security, error handling, form processing, an ORM etc... Over-engineering is an epidemic.
- LeafStorm 12y ago
  I almost went down this route on a project once. As soon as I noticed myself writing an identity map, I slapped myself in the face and just downloaded Symfony.
  - girvo 12y ago
    Funnily, this is the reason I adore Slim so much. In the PHP world, it gives me exactly what I require in a framework, and nothing else. Slapping it on top of a well-defined class heirachy becomes a simple exercise. I like it so much, that I'm porting it to Hack/HHVM[0]! [0] http://github.com/LeanFramework/Lean http://github.com/LeanFramework/Lean
  - Gigablah 12y ago
    Symfony is awesome but I feel they try to stuff too much into the default framework configuration. I don't want all those silly annotations, for example.

temuze 12y ago

The first Python web framework I used was Django. I'm really glad I came across it first because I was inexperienced at the time and it forced me to adopt a lot of good practices. However, now that I'm more experienced, I can relate a little to what Aaron is saying here. Learning all of this boilerplate stuff is annoying! Recently, I started contributing to a friend's rails app and I found the process of learning how to use each separate little tool tiresome. This is why I like Pyramid - it starts off dirt simple. Hello World is almost as short in Pyramid as it is in Flask. As you grow, you can start organizing and adding different things as you need them. It has absolutely 0 magic. I find Pyramid to be a happy medium between Flask's minimalism and Django's extensibility.

Yuioup 12y ago
I wonder. How popular is Pyramid? I ask because I found Pyramid to be quite intimidating the first time (I'm not an exprienced Python developer). It took me four attempts to finally 'get' it - the first three times giving up in frustration and leaving it alone for 2-3 months before trying again. Now that I get it though, it seems like an interesting framework but not a productive one. I've only dabbled in Pyramid with my free time and have never built a serious project with it, but I can't imagine building anything large scale with it. (I'm a .NET developer BTW, MVC is what I work with in my day job)
- achillean 12y ago
  Shodan is a decently-sized website and runs on Pyramid (https://www.shodan.io https://www.shodan.io). I don't know how popular it is in the general Python community, but it's been amazing to work with as a framework.
- sontek 12y ago
  We (https://www.surveymonkey.com/ https://www.surveymonkey.com/) use it for all our services. I can't imagine using another framework! Pyramid is great for what we do. I also know http://www.cars.com/ http://www.cars.com/ is heavily powered by Pyramid.
dangayle 12y ago

gprasant 12y ago

They say hell hath no fury like a lisp fan scorned. I wonder if they hadn't been acquired, would they have still used Lisp ?

bensw 12y ago
This blog post refers to a rewrite that happened before the Condé Nast acquisition.
keysersosa 12y ago
We switched to python about 4 months into the startup and a full year before getting acquired.
- raldi 12y ago
  And some people still haven't forgiven you.
- zoomerang 12y ago
  I can remember this switch back in the day, but for some reason my memory has failed me. I could have sworn the original was in Haskell, not Lisp. Selective memory I guess.
alexis 12y ago
Great post on that when Steve made the switch. http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html

andyzweb 12y ago

RIP Aaron ;_;

general_failure 12y ago

Is reddit that simple to rewrite over the weekend?

wcummings 12y ago
In 2005, very probably
- keysersosa 12y ago
  Yup that was the case. Though, I believe it was also a long weekend -- I think it might have been Veteran's day because I remember putting the finishing touches on it around Thanksgiving.

wcummings 12y ago

What Lisp webserver was used, originally? Hunchentoot? What web servers/stack are Lispers using these days?

keysersosa 12y ago
At the time it was "TBNL" (http://weitz.de/tbnl/ http://weitz.de/tbnl/), which I believe has indeed evolved into Hunchentoot.
elwell 12y ago
> What web servers/stack are Lispers using these days? If you're using Clojure, ring + tomcat, etc...
eudox 12y ago
>What web servers/stack are Lispers using these days? Clack (https://github.com/fukamachi/clack https://github.com/fukamachi/clack)
orthecreedence 12y ago
I use Wookie a lot (http://wookie.lyonbros.com/ http://wookie.lyonbros.com/) but I'm biased because I built it. It's a non-blocking CL app server.

_stem 12y ago

For all people still thinking that Django is not "lean" or flexible enough for their next project, let me just leave this here: https://speakerdeck.com/mstepniowski/django-best-python-micro-web-framework https://speakerdeck.com/mstepniowski/django-best-python-micr... A single-file web application in Django: https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/polls.py https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/poll...

keysersosa 12y ago
Yeah it should be noted that all of the referenced decisions we made around web frameworks in this thread predate django's 1.0 release. I think I was comparing pylons to django 0.96 iirc, and in 2005 when aaron wrote web.py, I don't think django was on anybody's radar (or at least it wasn't on ours). Django has definitely come a long way!
INTPenis 12y ago
>A single-file web application in Django: https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/poll.. https://github.com/mstepniowski/microdjango/blob/master/poll.... That still looks very complicated compared to most microframeworks I've used, including web.py. And all that django-specific logic that needs to be in there makes it harder to read unless you're familiar with the django ecosystem.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >And all that django-specific logic that needs to be in there makes it harder to read unless you're familiar with the django ecosystem. What "django-specific" logic? Those are standard imports and a few helper objects, the kind of which you'll find in any web framework. [edit: importants => imports]
  - INTPenis 12y ago
    I've been using flask lately and I could compress four of those imports into one import in flask. And the settings aren't even necessary. All these things, when compared to a true microframework, contribute in legibility of the code.

pshc 12y ago

We currently use web.py + gevent to run our API where I work. It's really easy to work with since it's so tiny and simple, and since we only need JSON in and out for now, it's perfectly sufficient. Before web.py, we were on a scary Tornado implementation. The API was rewritten to web.py in a week with a minimal delta. We won't be on web.py forever, and gevent sometimes kicks up minor fusses, but I think web.py has given us a nice malleable form that helped us get out of a terrible place, and we can easily hop off once we decide where we want to be. RIP aaronsw.

quasse 12y ago
I'm not very familiar with Tornado (we've switched to mostly Flask now) but I'd be interested to know what kinds of problems cropped up that lead you to switch to web.py
- pshc 12y ago
  Tornado requires asynchronous I/O. Almost all of the existing I/O was done synchronously. Yeah.

tim333 12y ago

For another take on the Reddit rewrite from Steve Huffman see: http://www.pyvideo.org/video/234/pycon-2009--keynote--reddit--steve-huffman-and-al http://www.pyvideo.org/video/234/pycon-2009--keynote--reddit... 25m 40s

gcb0 12y ago

> "It means readable HTML with the proper HTTP headers." said all the other frameworks's authors a few months before him that are now churning out deprecated headers just like that one will in a couple months, while gallantly trying to protect the user from handling headers.

voltagex_ 12y ago
Huh?

menriquez 12y ago

" Another concluded: “some vc suit wants a maintainable-by-joe-programmer product. I hope he pays you millions.”" so this guy is implying that we should be choosing our programming languages based on how hard and expensive it will be to get other dev's to work on it? that is the most economically unsound and elitist thing i've heard recently.

83457 12y ago

Would clojure fare better now?

closetnerd 12y ago

Its incredible how intelligent this kid was.

ocb 12y ago
Just 19 when he wrote this!

coldtea 12y ago

>The Lisp newsgroup, comp.lang.lisp, was upset about the switch that they’re currently planning to write a competitor to reddit in Lisp, to show how right they are or something. That must have ended as a huge success, because as we all know the important thing behind a website is the backend language...

Perceval 12y ago
Isn't Hacker News written in Lisp?
- dllthomas 12y ago
  I think you miss the point of the parent comment, which is that backend language is an implementation detail and generally shouldn't matter to users. You can disagree with that point, it just is a very different point than anything addressed by noting that HN has a Lisp backend.

rpdillon 12y ago

I've used CherryPy on a number of projects, and I really like it, but rarely see it mentioned in discussions of Python web programming. It's light and minimal, and seems equally deft for writing APIs as conventional web page driven apps. Flask is mentioned all the time, however. Does anyone have insight into the popularity of Flask vs. CherryPy?