Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

A comment by Steve Huffman on my blog[1], from back when they switched away to Python:<p><pre><code> I didn&#x27;t say the are *no* shoulders to stand on. There are just fewer. Without a doubt, Edi Weitz single-handedly made reddit possible. He&#x27;s an army-of-one producing good Lisp libraries. The issues that made it really hard to stick with Lisp weren&#x27;t particularily Lispy. The biggest trouble that plagued us was that we could never quite get Lisp reddit stable enough to sleep at night. There were weird threading issues that would bring the site to its knees a couple times a day and required constant monitoring. </code></pre> Another comment, from Paul Graham:<p><pre><code> &gt; One can argue that they betrayed the worth of a &gt; philosophy merely for cheap money. Ye gods, enough with the conspiracy theories already. Y Combinator didn&#x27;t know Reddit was going to use Lisp when we funded them. And the reason they switched (or at least, the last straw) was all too mundane: some thread bug in CMUCL that made the site keep crashing. </code></pre> 1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lemonodor.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;001301.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lemonodor.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;001301.html</a>

Here&#x27;s an updated version with DB tables (PostGres) that runs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tamurashingo&#x2F;reddit1.0&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tamurashingo&#x2F;reddit1.0&#x2F;</a><p><pre><code> Require: CommonLisp (tested on SBCL) PostgreSQL memcached smtp server CL-USER&gt; (reddit:startup-reddit) #&lt;HUNCHENTOOT:EASY-ACCEPTOR (host *, port 8000)&gt; </code></pre> Writing a CL web app today is definitely doable. You won&#x27;t find a framework with bells and whistles (yet), but all the required building blocks: web servers (Hunchentoot or Clack, like WSGI for Python), choice in templating engines (Djula is Django-like and I like it a lot), etc.<p>To replace JS a maximum I use HTMX which is language and framework agnostic, life is beautiful.<p>In the end, you can build a static binary with all the static assets, send it to your server and run it.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fukamachi&#x2F;clack">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fukamachi&#x2F;clack</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lispcookbook.github.io&#x2F;cl-cookbook&#x2F;web.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lispcookbook.github.io&#x2F;cl-cookbook&#x2F;web.html</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CodyReichert&#x2F;awesome-cl#web-frameworks">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CodyReichert&#x2F;awesome-cl#web-frameworks</a>

So I&#x27;ve read that they wrote it in Lisp at Paul Graham&#x27;s request or to win favor. Does anyone know if writing your startup code in Lisp still has that benefit?

I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled on the Abuse source code a while ago and started reading through it, I&#x27;ve seen other people talk about it here but here&#x27;s a link:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;videogamepreservation&#x2F;abuse">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;videogamepreservation&#x2F;abuse</a>

Time flies. I still remember when there were quite some discussions in the communities when the initial reddit team made it public that they were switching from Lisp to Python for development. It created a lot of controversy, especially the specific reasons they named. I think quite some of them happened here on hacker news. Back then of course reddit was just a tiny startup as many.<p>So it is funny to see this now popping up as a news item. Shows, how long this is in the past and how much reddit has grown in size.

MathB.in, a simple pastebin for mathematical snippets, went in the opposite direction. It was first written in PHP and then later rewritten in Common Lisp. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;susam.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mathbin-turns-ten.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;susam.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mathbin-turns-ten.html</a> for the full story.

It was announced in comp.lang.lisp most early adopters were lisp users.<p>The first Reddit drama was when Paul Graham was caught having a sock puppet account to defend his arguments :)

What language is HN written in ?

The current reddit seems to be written in js&#x2F;python. I can see the logic behind js since its a lot easier to find devs and thanks to all the hard work of the engineers behind v8 its not a slow language. I do not understand why python was chosen though. If you need more speed you would go with c++ and not python which is the slowest popular language.<p>Anyone got any insight into why python was chosen?.

Here is the twitter thread about it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ShriramKMurthi&#x2F;status&#x2F;1669877506034266113?s=20" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ShriramKMurthi&#x2F;status&#x2F;166987750603426611...</a>

Would be fun to see what it takes to run it!

scraper.lisp contains parameters for a &quot;delicious-scanner&quot; to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;del.icio.us&#x2F;popular&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;del.icio.us&#x2F;popular&#x2F;</a> ... also something which is gone &#x2F; replaced

&gt; (defvar <i>database-password</i> &quot;pgcwip42:&quot;)<p>Hope they changed that password!

&gt;&quot;written in Lisp&quot;<p>And why does that matter? Whatever turns one on.