Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

by newsoul • 3 years ago

218 134 3 years ago

github.com

newsoul• 3 years ago

Here is the twitter thread about it: https://twitter.com/ShriramKMurthi/status/166987750603426611...

esperent2• 3 years ago

The source code is much more interesting than some Twitter bro's hot take.

"We took a wrong turn w/ software."

... apparently.

Save your energy and check out the repo instead.

I don't totally blame the guy though. If you want to play the stupid Twitter game, you have to add a trite but provocative hot take to every post you make, lest your writings languish in obscurity. The only way to win is not to play, truly.

defrost• 3 years ago

Takes me back .. once upon a time I was an admin on old OG Freenode + #C + #lisp and recall when that was floated to take potshots at and use as a beta test crowd.

The first non reddit team submissions were some very dry comp sci papers and tech manuals .. the cats came not long after.

optbuild• 3 years ago

He is not a Twitter bro though. He has developed software extensively. He is a PL researcher, a professor at BrownU, now working in computing education.

paganel2• 3 years ago

Thanks for the link. Among other things it made be feel old, as in I have a post on my blog from back then writing about the Lisp to Python switch that Reddit was carrying out and it’s interesting to see computer programmers that look like they’re in their early 30s or such and not knowing about it at all.

Those were more interesting and especially more vibrant times when it came to the web. Granted, the money was not as abundant as it is now.

dotcoma• 3 years ago

What language is HN written in ?

bennyg• 3 years ago

Arc I believe.

KerrAvon• 3 years ago

OMG, Paul Graham actually released Arc in some form? I thought he never finished it.

I was going to make snarky comment about how between spez and PG, Lisp must actually be extended-release brain poison for people in executive management positions; now I wonder if spez just knows PG personally and takes his advice.

thatwasunusual• 3 years ago

Arc, which is a Lisp dialect.

Too obscure and weird for me, but quite interesting. :)

allanrbo2• 3 years ago

https://github.com/wting/hackernews

raydev• 3 years ago

This appears to be a mirror of HN as it was 11 years ago. The site could've been entirely rewritten in something else since then.

dang2• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483715

krapp• 3 years ago

http://arclanguage.org/

allanrbo2• 3 years ago

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

avodonosov3• 3 years ago

DB schema is missing. If there was an .sql script to create all the tables, I could run this reddit version.

Most of the information about columns and tables could be recovered from data.lisp and view-defs.lisp. Maybe also old.lisp

PawBer• 3 years ago

You'd also have to find a copy of the web framework it uses because it got renamed and the author disabled the old download address.

vindarel3• 3 years ago

Here's an updated fork with DB migrations: https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/

mchaver2• 3 years ago

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

fnordsensei• 3 years ago

As someone who’s been involved in both, it’s not like the language you pick doesn’t make a difference, but I’d say that there are other factors that vastly overshadow it.

For example, one thing we were told when choosing to write in a lisp was that we’d have problems finding developers. It turned out to be true in that we received fewer applications, but compared to the same process with a more mainstream language, I’d say the applicants were on average of higher quality. So by the final step, we were approximately considering the same number of résumés in both cases.

But in the end, the language is not what has made the biggest impact. It’s been other, more universally applicable things, such as team dynamics and communication, clarity of vision and consistency in execution, process and planning, and a ton of other things where the particular language is not a factor.

bitwize2• 3 years ago

Many of the most famous "done in Lisp" products I know of have the delightful feature that it's not Lisp itself that provides a solution that other languages can't. Rather:

1) Developers who like Lisp tend to be really smart, well-read, and well-educated.

2) Lisp streamlines these developers' thought processes, allowing them to get more done with less, fast.

For example, the early Naughty Dog games written in GOOL/GOAL take clever advantage of asset data to produce effects close to the very edge of what the PlayStation/PlayStation 2 can do. No feature in these Lisp languages made this possible where C or C++ could not, but working in Lisp enabled the developers to iterate quickly, experiment, and arrive at interesting innovative solutions within the required time frame.

mchaver2• 3 years ago

Thanks for the insight. I've had a similar experience with using Haskell. It is a smaller pool of developers, but they tend to be higher quality on average.

unshavedyak• 3 years ago

For example, one thing we were told when choosing to write in a lisp was that we’d have problems finding developers. It turned out to be true in that we received fewer applications, but compared to the same process with a more mainstream language, I’d say the applicants were on average of higher quality. So by the final step, we were approximately considering the same number of résumés in both cases.

I can echo this statement with Rust. Same story. Our comparison was Python to Rust. Same app. Big leap, i know.

40yearoldman• 3 years ago

I think requiring your startup in lisp also keeps the type of engineers away you don’t want.

In all of my career, it’s not those who know who have been good. It’s those who know how to learn new things fast that are good. It’s people who problem solve that make good engineers.

In the inverse. If somebody has a negative reaction to lisp, it’s a sign of a poor engineer.

FlyingSnake• 3 years ago

While I'm sure there are startups using Lisp, Clojure might be the most widely used List dialect amongst startup.

agumonkey• 3 years ago

i have very very limited experience, but at the time lisp still had some values that weren't mainstream

that said a language can push you to the moon or help you crash faster, team culture and fit will matter more IMO

formerly_proven• 3 years ago

Arguably the value of Lisps has been diminished quite a lot with the advent of highly dynamic "multi-paradigm" scripting languages like Ruby and Python. The "Lisp superpower" has traditionally been that small, tightly coupled groups (quite often n=1, the most tightly coupled group) can achieve a lot very quickly without wasting a lot of time on "boilerplate". Those scripting languages enable largely the same thing.

lc9er• 3 years ago

Yes. The best decision they made was to flatter a billionaire’s ego. Then Reddit largely succeeded despite them.

defen• 3 years ago

I doubt pg was a billionaire in 2005

philwelch• 3 years ago

It's probably not the way you're making it sound. This was in the early early days of YC, when there were like eight companies per batch, and at the peak of PG's influence as an online essayist. He wrote a lot about the benefits of Lisp and how Lisp was a competitive advantage for Viaweb. So it was probably less a case of trying to win favor with a seed investor and more a case of actually being convinced it was a good business decision.

coldtea2• 3 years ago

It never had any particular benefit to write your startup code in Lisp.

That myth came from a few posts by a person who was a huge proponent of Lisp, in an era were web (front and backend) development was much easier, and web-related libraries were lacking in all languages (so it wasn't like Lisp's smaller popularity would hurt you there).

It's an example of one.

If they didn't get lucky and Yahoo! bought some other company in the same domain in their place (they already have a few competitors) the whole "Lisp as a secret weapon" would be moot.

Statistically speaking, 99.9% of succesful startups were written not in any Lisp, and 0.1% of them in Lisp. Not the biggest 0.1% either, more towards the bottom, in the context of web company deals during the ramp up to the dot-com bust. Viaweb was sold for $50 million. For context, Yahoo! bought Broadcast.com a year later for 5 billion and doc.com startups of the era routinely raising and burning $50-$100 million for fun - heck, Razorfish (a design consultancy) built websites for clients like Levis, Sony, Mercedes Benz, etc. for $20-$40 million (and that's late-90s era websites, nothing especially fancy).

Of course all that's irrelevant to whether Viaweb was written in Lisp. Which is my point, exactly. What's more, Yahoo! even scrapped all their Lisp code soon after.

Now, writing your startup code in a productive language, that doesn't slow down the development team, allows for easy+quality hires, and so on - even if it's not the best for when you get huge, is a benefit. That hardly requires Lisp.

PheonixPharts• 3 years ago

Statistically speaking, 99.9% of succesful startups were written not in any Lisp, and 0.1% of them in Lisp.

I think the point that PG was making wasn't that P(lisp|success) > P(blub|success) is what's key but that P(success|lisp) > P(success|blub)

What's more, Yahoo! even scrapped all their Lisp code soon after.

I'm hardly a PG fanboy, but I have to say this is exactly what's expected in PG's original post on the subject[0]. It's precisely because big companies will only stick to blub languages that Lisp becomes an advantage for a startup.

The point of "Beating the Averages" isn't that you must use Lisp but that small groups of elite hackers can use more powerful tools than larger organizations can't get away with because they generally have lower skilled, only comfortable with blub, programmers.

The reason we don't see many startups following this advice now isn't because it's wrong (necessarily), but because since that essay was written, the vast majority of the startup ecosystem has come to resemble large companies. We've had a pipeline churning out devs for many years now. The ones that are great at leetcode and playing the game go to FAANG, the ones that aren't go to startups. It's not even about where the higher skilled devs are because that hasn't played a factor in most companies success in a long time.

With rare exceptions, startups are no longer created by brilliant hackers looking to change how things are, but by business minded people looking to take advantage of the easy VC money in the last decade. Interviewing at startups used to be exciting, now the vast majority feel like they're run by people who couldn't manage to get a director role at a FAANG.

0. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

abecedarius• 3 years ago

Lisp-vs-mainstream was just a very different comparison in the 90s versus now. Most of Lisp's advantages have been incorporated into its big competitors. At the time the advantages were nothing to sneer at, even though there were counterpoints then too.

wudangmonk• 3 years ago

The current reddit seems to be written in js/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.

Anyone got any insight into why python was chosen?.

colordrops• 3 years ago

I imagine because it's obviously "fast enough" performance-wise, and an order of magnitude faster dev-wise and hiring-wise.

buildbot• 3 years ago

Not fast enough to develop good moderation features with 2000 employees

littlestymaar4• 3 years ago

Not fast enough to keep their operational at bay though.

badrabbit2• 3 years ago

Ummm...same reason as JS? Why do you think they need more speed to the point they need c++? Do you think finding c++ devs easier than python devs?

wiseowise5• 3 years ago

Ummm...same reason as JS? Why do you think they need more speed to the point they need c++?

Well, given complaints how much 3rd party apps cost them, they’d better off optimize their crap first.

hickelpickle• 3 years ago

Because Spez can't read it, he can only parse shapes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq7DEUhr7o0

sen• 3 years ago

I can’t tell if this is an AI fake or not, and that scares me.

dimal• 3 years ago

That’s not what he said. He’s actually making an interesting point about readable code. I’m not defending his current behavior, just these comments about readable code.

winrid2• 3 years ago

It was chosen because at the time because python was much more mature and productive. They didnt use Django, but as an example Django is still more productive than any Node framework I've tried thus far, too, and we have types now. :)

codetrotter• 3 years ago

NodeJS didn't even exist when Reddit started using Python, as far as I can tell.

Initial release of NodeJS was May 27, 2009; 14 years ago.

Swartz was involved in the development of Reddit until he departed from the company in 2007.

And we know that parts of the Python code for Reddit was written by Swartz.

markdown• 3 years ago

Aaron Swartz replaced the Lisp with web.py

brabel• 3 years ago

There's a post explaining exactly why they moved from CL to Python, and it was basically because of library availability.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060206185841/http://reddit.com...

Why they moved away from CL:

"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."

And why Python was chosen:

"So why Python?

We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. In most cases, the Lisp code translated very easily into Python. Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn. It's been fun so far, so we'll see where it takes us."

So, basically, they were happy with CL except for lack of libraries, and because they also knew Python already, and they knew there were more libraries for Python, they picked it. Simple as that.

mg3• 3 years ago

I have a theory (which nobody I ever met shares) that the visually most beautiful language is the one that long-term results in the fastest development of a project:

Visual noise is like inflation. A constant tax on what you do. But you barely notice it. But it accumulates because it is constantly leading to slightly worse and more complex code. Since it is harder to focus on a noisy something in front of you, you make slightly worse decisions. Over time this accumulates. And similar to how Warren Buffet noticed that a Dollar of his youth is not even worth a penny these days, over time, exponentially more effort is needed to develop the more and more complex system.

So over a longer timeframe, a visually more elegant language wins by a long shot.

Python is the visually most elegant language.

bitwize2• 3 years ago

Scheme has entered the chat.

stuaxo• 3 years ago

Although now people use types with python, is it still ?

mtlmtlmtlmtl2• 3 years ago

__visuallyelegant__

Aardwolf• 3 years ago

This depends on your editor color settings though. C++ can look very handsome

jitix• 3 years ago

What you’re saying is only partially correct - Yes, for more exploratory programming for a new product with full US/EU/CANZUK based dev workforce it makes sense to prioritize maintainability.

For a company complaining about infrastructure costs for a product that has been cloned many times over, and which is large enough to hire offshore devs, the cost equation favours rewriting in something like Go, Rust or even Java. These are quite tailored towards Reddit’s current use case and many companies including Twitter did that rewrite.

Ferret7446• 3 years ago

Those hypothetical tiny gains are instantly and completely eclipsed by the lack of static checking support.

ssivark• 3 years ago

Python is the visually most elegant language.

Having program login buried in a nauseating amount of boilerplate doesn’t feel very “visually elegant” :-P

isatty• 3 years ago

I agree with you. C++ and Python are great. Haskell looks the best but it’s way too tiring to write. Go is the worst offender.

traverseda2• 3 years ago

Do you actually think CPU usage is a concern here? Database performance and optimization, horizontal scaling, cache optimization (and cache invalidation) are the big problems. Security is also a big problem.

The performance critical part is the database, and that at least used to be written in Java (cassandra db).

Writing the bit of glue code between your high performance database and your fronted in cpp would introduce all kinds of really bad potential bugs, scary remote code execution bugs.

CPU usage of that glue code might take up 10% of your hardware budget worst case, even with a "slow" language. It's just not a concern.

TeMPOraL3• 3 years ago

We're not talking about 10% factors, but 10x factors between slow and fast languages. People say CPU usage doesn't matter when you're horizontally scaling, but horizontal scaling increases your ongoing operational costs, and you often are horizontally scaling precisely because your code is too slow.

phire• 3 years ago

I'm not sure why python was chosen.

But I contributed a tiny bit of code to reddit back when it was open source and chatted with reddit engineers on IRC, so I do know the official justification (as of 2010ish) for reddit sticking with python:

Websites are mostly IO bound anyway. The hot parts like markdown formatting and templating are already c modules. So the performances gain for rewriting in a compiled language aren't large enough to justify it.

Baeocystin• 3 years ago

That seems reasonable to me, even today. Am I off-base?

marcinzm• 3 years ago

In my experience one of the limiting factors of a language as you scale is library support. You want to do more complex things (for better or worse) or integrations (monitoring, etc.) but the development cost is very high since you have to write the whole part yourself or make tradeoffs on the limited libraries available.

susam2• 3 years ago

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 https://susam.net/blog/mathbin-turns-ten.html for the full story.

prirai• 3 years ago

I've tried mathb and it feels amazing and blazing fast. Perhaps the best way to go for typing in quick snippets and sharing with others.

o1y32• 3 years ago

I would argue that for such a small website (in the sense of both codebase size and traffic), which language is used does not matter, and is almost purely a personal preference.

susam2• 3 years ago

Yes, it was personal preference indeed. I have written a little more about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32980708

vjust• 3 years ago

I checked out MathB.in. Neat stuff!! I've started and stopped with the Lisp/Schema family several times. When other languages frustrate me, I go back to lisp for some therapy.

FpUser2• 3 years ago

"written in Lisp"

And why does that matter? Whatever turns one on.

tmtvl• 3 years ago

It matters for the same reason that "X written in Rust" or "which companies are using Lisp?" matters: some people refuse to give Lisp a look unless every F500 company has at least 3 major projects written in it.

FpUser2• 3 years ago

"some people refuse to give Lisp a look"

Nothing is wrong with this. There are crapload of languages and very little benefit from a practical standpoint for a single person to use them all. They're just tools. Some are better, some are worse and some are highly specialized. What is being built is important, not how.

_ph_• 3 years ago

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.

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.

nabla9• 3 years ago

It was announced in comp.lang.lisp most early adopters were lisp users.

The first Reddit drama was when Paul Graham was caught having a sock puppet account to defend his arguments :)

chimeracoder• 3 years ago

The first Reddit drama was when Paul Graham was caught having a sock puppet account to defend his arguments :)

Do you have a link to this thread?

jimsimmons• 3 years ago

wouldn’t surprise me if he has like 8 alt accounts here and on Twitter

fuzztester• 3 years ago

How was he caught?

omgmajk• 3 years ago

I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled on the Abuse source code a while ago and started reading through it, I've seen other people talk about it here but here's a link:

https://github.com/videogamepreservation/abuse

choas• 3 years ago

scraper.lisp contains parameters for a "delicious-scanner" to http://del.icio.us/popular/ ... also something which is gone / replaced

beached_whale• 3 years ago

The original del.icio.us was pretty good, it got weird later on.

shakesbeard• 3 years ago

wow, now that's a website I haven't thought of in a while

vindarel3• 3 years ago

Here's an updated version with DB tables (PostGres) that runs: https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/

    Require:

    CommonLisp (tested on SBCL)
    PostgreSQL
    memcached
    smtp server

    CL-USER> (reddit:startup-reddit)
    #<HUNCHENTOOT:EASY-ACCEPTOR (host *, port 8000)>

Writing a CL web app today is definitely doable. You won'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.

To replace JS a maximum I use HTMX which is language and framework agnostic, life is beautiful.

In the end, you can build a static binary with all the static assets, send it to your server and run it.

- https://github.com/fukamachi/clack

- https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html

- https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#web-frameworks

Capricorn24812• 3 years ago

HTMX is not anymore framework agnostic than JS. It's a JS library. You can use any backend with either.

decross• 3 years ago

He meant that HTMX can work with a backend written in any language/framework. It doesn't constrain you to use any specific server-side tech.

jjwiseman• 3 years ago

A comment by Steve Huffman on my blog[1], from back when they switched away to Python:

  I didn't say the are *no* shoulders to stand on. There are
  just fewer.

  Without a doubt, Edi Weitz single-handedly made reddit
  possible. He's an army-of-one producing good Lisp
  libraries. The issues that made it really hard to stick
  with Lisp weren'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.

Another comment, from Paul Graham:

  > One can argue that they betrayed the worth of a
  > philosophy merely for cheap money.

  Ye gods, enough with the conspiracy theories already. Y
  Combinator didn'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.

1. http://lemonodor.com/archives/001301.html

jeffrallen• 3 years ago

(defvar database-password "pgcwip42:")

Hope they changed that password!

Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp

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