

One benefit of a Lisp-driven website - mqt
http://briancarper.net/2008/02/11/one-benefit-of-a-lisp-driven-website/

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pg
I'm constantly taking advantage of this on News.YC.

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derefr
"Well, Perl/Ruby/PHP don't run persistently on the server."

Depends on the server. It's hard to find a Ruby webapp that runs _non_
-persistently.

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mattjones
And it doesn't matter anyway. He's talking about adding records to the DB and
uploading images, the same things you'd do through a web interface.

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cstejerean
You can certainly do something similar with other languages under the right
constraints. For example you can fire up a copy of your application from the
command line (or from within Emacs using IPython mode for example). The
difference is that you're not connecting to the same instance as the web
server so for example you can't change in memory constructs. But for an
applications that uses a database for data storage you can certainly
accomplish similar things.

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brlewis
I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum. I used Scheme to make ourdoings.com.
I know how to open up a REPL on the server but I never have. To keep me
motivated to implement features in such a way that anybody can use them, I
maintain a strict discipline of not doing anything that I haven't made a user
interface for. This keeps me motivated to implement new features for all my
users.

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ice5nake
Accessing functions from a shell is available to lots of programming
languages. Be it naturally or through an add on.

It sounds like Mr. Carper just likes what's familiar to him, which is the real
benefit.

I do like the idea of a command line style interface to a blog.

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yariv
I've been enjoying this capability with Erlang too.

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michaelneale
Huh? I have seen the same done with rails over and over. Well kind of.

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cstejerean
Really? You've seen folks running SSH into a server and firing up irb to add a
blog post?

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lojic
"Couldn't you write some standalone scripts to run from the commandline to
insert new posts into your blog?"

As someone mentioned in the comments on that site, there's no need to write
special scripts for this - using script/console does the job nicely with
Rails.

    
    
      script/console
      post = BlogPost.new("title", "body", ... )
      post.save
      ^d
    

You're modifying the database vs. in memory objects, but when you're scaling
up via multiple app server instances, it's handy to store the info in the db.

~~~
michaelneale
yeah thats what I meant. Not quite the same as the article, but to similar
effect.

I do appreciate the "lisp" approach though, for sure.

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Tichy
So you just execute a lisp statement (post "headline" "mybody")?

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agentbleu
"When I want to post a new model, I SSH to my server, fire up Emacs, connect
to the Lisp running on my running server via local SLIME, and run an ADD-MODEL
function. Simple. Lisp automatically timestamps my posts, and checks for
empty-string model names, and all the other good stuff you'd want from a
control panel. (Plus if it fails, I get a debugger.)"

yea sounds it...

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WenomousVit
My thoughts exactly.

I mean, that's great for him personally and all, but "Step 1: Use Emacs"
pretty much makes this a non-starter for something like 95% of the people in
the world who might run a blog or personal website.

