

Slashdot discovers Lisp - michael_dorfman
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/25/1553220

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tvon
While I think reading Slashdot comments is bad for you're outlook on the
world, saying that they are just now "discovering" Lisp is pretty ignorant.

~~~
SwellJoe
Very true. I'd guess that 90% of pg's audience for _A Plan for Spam_ (which
led on to the popularity of his later essays) came from Slashdot. It's where I
first heard about pg, and Trevor and probably rtm for that matter. Lisp has
been discussed for years on Slashdot.

Also, folks here may not realize it, but Slashdot still wields a mighty
traffic hammer; it is not some irrelevant also-ran that redditors/diggers/HN
readers might think. At least one of our websites has appeared on TechCrunch,
Reddit, Hacker News, and Digg in some context (never a major story, but
usually getting some votes and some discussion, and occasionally making the
front page)...one time my co-founder mentioned something we were working on
_in a comment_ on Slashdot. It was the highest traffic day we've ever had (to
this day, and our traffic has increased steadily since launch, so every few
weeks we have a new peak; but always less than Slashdot day). Our traffic is
pretty good, in general, for the kind of business we run. But Slashdot is the
motherlode. I speak of it fondly, still.

Anyway, for a site with a user base that large and diverse, Slashdot isn't as
entirely idiotic as it could be. It's certainly no worse than Digg, and only
slightly worse than reddit. And 10+ years ago when it was the size of Hacker
News, it was roughly equally interesting and smart, though its focus was
somewhat different (less business, more Open Source). The signal to noise is
too low for me to spend much time there, but it's silly to imagine that Hacker
News would remain as good as it is with a user count in the millions, like
slashdot.

~~~
iamelgringo
I picked up Hackers and Painters because of a review over at Slashdot five
years ago: <http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/07/0456241>

My life hasn't been the same since.

------
smhinsey
It's been awhile since I've actually read any discussions on slashdot, but it
seems like the default presumption of bad faith that ruined so much of the
conversation when I did hasn't gone anywhere. This is an unfortunate
phenomenon that seems to dominate much of online culture.

~~~
DenisM
I think it runs deeper than simply the assumption of bad faith. When growing
up children go through phases of conforming to their parents and then
distancing from them, and also conforming to their peers and then distancing
from (most of) them as well. This seems to be a part of the personality
formation process - at some point people feel compelled to disagree in the
most confrontational form (and even demean their opponents) not to look for
truth, but to define their own self. They also often engage in group identity
defining behaviors, such as rallies about persecution, "real
men/hackers/programmers never/always do X" posturing etc. Also voting on
agreement/disagreement axis (instead of useful/wasteful axis) is one of those.
Incidentally, 18 yo is the typical drafting age for many draft armies, this is
when "us vs them" mentality can be readily utilized.

What's remarkable is that with the advent of the Internet we have places where
this process never ends. Rather than growing up, slashdot community is in
perpetual adolescent disagreement mode. The most mature members are leaving
and going elsewhere, to be supplanted by the newcomers.

I'm not necessarily right, but this narrative helps me make sense of what's
going on and provides a perspective on the community dynamics.

The two questions that interest me now are:

1\. Where are new HN members coming from?

2\. Where are they going to when they leave?

~~~
pubb
1\. digg. I still visit digg once in a while but for tech news HN is a better
fit. HN has great comments while it seems that a lot of commenters on digg are
trying to make puns.

~~~
DenisM
I think we're this '' close to an avalanche of puns here as well. I only hope
the leaves hold.

Example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555296>

------
omouse
What disgusts me is all the "C is faster" talk. Common Lisp was used with bare
metal on a particular type of machine. In fact, the Movitz OS still deals with
bare metal but on x86 and it's so so strange to see a bunch of hex mixed with
Lisp code.

~~~
mahmud
Common Lisp is sometimes frighteningly more bare-metal than C. I spent all
last night moving stuff from kernel-space, into user space, messing with them
in Lisp and sending them back up stream to the networking stack. By hand :-)

In C, even though you work with low-level memory regions and system
primitives, you're not _interacting_ with them. By the time you see side-
effects the process has long exited. In Lisp you can have open descriptors
floating around in your shell where you can echo and read stuff to them; you
can share a working buffer with a unix system call or signal, and _see_ it get
filled, changed and emptied! To realize that you can layer higher-level
conceptual tools over these primitives, including the entire CLOS metaobject
protocol, is something that's utterly gorgeous.

See what iolib does to Unix, specially see the multiplexing framework; that's
right, first class CLOS classes as wrappers for poll, select, epoll and
kselect; your choice. Writing specializing methods for system calls is
something no C programmer could ever imagine, much less enjoy ;-)

------
babo
I like his his closing sentence from a presentation: "This project was a huge
waste of time! And it’s not ﬁnished."
[http://tlug.jp/meetings/2008/11/serving-dynamic-webpages-
in-...](http://tlug.jp/meetings/2008/11/serving-dynamic-webpages-in-less-then-
a-millisecond_john-fremlin_handout.pdf)

------
vii
Thanks for the comments guys, if anybody's interested in trying it I've an
explanation here: <http://john.freml.in/teepeedee2-using>

------
mahmud
You made it to /. John! :-)

Not fair, you didn't tell me you're going for a world record when you tossed
your "little webserver" project so casually in IRC.

I guess tis the season for beating nginx in Lisp ;-)

~~~
ptomato
He didn't benchmark it against nginx. Per the linked presentation, all he
actually benchmarked it against was mongrel and lighty w/fastcgi for php.

~~~
spooneybarger
Its amusing how often slashdot summaries are wrong and no one reads the
original article...

the actual quote is:

"It is faster than all(?) other web application frameworks for serving small
dynamic webpages. Please let me know if you have a case where another
framework is faster!"

Not once does he say it is faster than nginx or anything of the sort, just a
bad summary and away people go with it.

------
ilitirit
Anyone willing to take up this challenge?

[http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1244601&cid=280...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1244601&cid=28085625)

~~~
tsuraan
Sounds like something the Alioth performance game was meant for. I'd point him
towards chameneos-redux; the current haskell implementation
([http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=ch...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=chameneosredux&lang=ghc&id=2))
is taking 3.73s to run, while the C champion
([http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=ch...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=chameneosredux&lang=gcc&box=1))
is taking 12.29s. The current C implementation is also small, so I would
imagine that it qualifies as a "relatively simple task".

------
rams
The title is not fair at all. Slashdot introduced me to PG via "Beating the
Averages" many years ago.

------
babo
Please help me to run this from ClozureMCL! The later is up and running,
teepeedee2 is there but README not even mention how to start it up. Thanks!

------
blue1
Actually, the slashdot article is about LISP, all uppercased. It is the
clueless variety of the language, not unlike PERL.

------
c00p3r
Nothing could be faster today than nginx for static content. =) As for
backends, even php in fastcgi mode along with eaccelerator would be faster,
let alone memcached-balanced storages.

People at facebook not so stupid as people used to think.

