* Zeus would rather write his own.
<Pandora> your own what?
<Zeus> Web framework.
<Pandora> I don't know what that is
<Zeus> Pandora: An app that takes care of the glue for web applications
<Pandora> what is the glue?
<Zeus> Pandora: Well, you need a webserver, usually a templating system, a nice interface to the information provided to the webserver, a way of routing URLs to specific modules, &c.
<Pandora> why make it so complicated?
<Zeus> Pandora: As opposed to what?
<Pandora> simple
<Zeus> How do you propose making it simple?
<Zeus> Pandora: There's a lot of bookkeeping involved in any web app of a decent size
<Pandora> what sort of bookkeeping?
<Zeus> Forgetting, for a moment, the issues of making a webserver (say you're using FastCGI with Apache or something), having bits of HTML scattered through your program really isn't a neat way of doing things, and it becomes completely unmanageable very fast for applications of any appreciable size
<Pandora> ok so you need lisp macros
* Zeus laughs.
<Pandora> am I wrong?
<Pandora> what's funny
<Zeus> Pandora: Do it and show me.
<Pandora> Zeus: I still don't know what's funny
<Zeus> If you tried it, you would.
<Pandora> Zeus: exactly what is it I have not tried?
<Zeus> Apparently, designing any kind of large web application :-)
<Pandora> Zeus: that is the problem right there, you are complicating things
* Zeus laughs.
<Pandora> Zeus: Why would anybody write a large program instead of a small simple one?
<Zeus> Er, because as great as the UNIX philosophy may be, sometimes people need an application that does more than a single string transformation.
<Zeus> I direct you, for example, to http://www.amazon.com/
<Pandora> Zeus: Right, and there is the false assumption, there's no reason a program that does more than a single string transform has to be complicated
<Zeus> I see
<Zeus> So how do you propose offering the features of Amazon without the program being complicated?
<Pandora> Zeus: You're only asking me that so you can laugh again
<Zeus> Of course.
<Zeus> That would be why you didn't answer this question last time, either? :-)
I don't get it.