Reddit Gives Up on Lisp
December 7th, 2005
I have to admit, I am a bit saddened to see reddit give up on Lisp.
> “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.”
However, having struggled with trying to find good Lisp libraries for building a web app, I can fully agree that most of it has to be built from the ground up. This adds much lead time. Even if it is quicker for a good coder to write a library in Lisp, you still have to write the *library* and not the *application*. I am somewhat surprised they chose Python over Ruby, but for ease of translation, I can see some of the benefits.
Permanent Link: Reddit Gives Up on Lisp | No Comments »