Reddit Clone in 10 minutes and 91 lines of Clojure | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Clone in 10 minutes and 91 lines of Clojure

bestinclass.dk

75 pointsicey26 comments

Exactly. A Reddit frontpage for 1 user and 10 articles should be about 90 lines of code.

I don't understand what you mean by "Exactly."

(I'm not trying to be snarky, I just seriously feel like I've missed the point)

I think the point is that replicating pretty much any site is trivially easy in any language if you don't have to worry about query performance, cacheing, scaling, etc.

Ah, that makes sense.

I didn't really see this article as being interesting from the "oh look, a reddit!" angle. I thought it was a good article in that it showed how to do a lot of things in Clojure: Java interop, a basic Compojure use case, and deployment with Leinengen.

Slightly on topic:

How would you attack the "query performance, cacheing, scaling, etc" problems?

http://highscalability.com/

This discussion reminds me of Fred Wilson's article about bit.ly "That's only Ten Lines of Code"

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/03/thats-only-ten-lines-of-code...

Sure, you can replicate lots of sites but to me Reddit wasn't great because of the tech, it was because they had built something really zeitgeisty that people liked.

Not to mention the hard part ... building a community.

And features such as comments.

What I meant to say is that it's a simple problem, and should be about 90 lines of code.

Actually this will serve as many users as your system can handle.

Different sense of the word "user".

Bestinclass.dk is always hyping clojure and actually does more damage than good. Remember the 'clojure vs python', 'clojure vs ruby' and 'clojure vs global warming' articles.

If you name your blog 'best in class' I think that sets that bar for the quality a bit higher than what is generally on display there.

I think Reddit clones would be a lot more commonplace and popular if they had a name other than "Reddit clones"; it's a simple site architecture in retrospect, analogous to a blog or a wiki. They are all categories of web applications that have interactive elements, but also act as websites for those who don't care to participate.

Now, imagine if blogs had been called "Wordpress clones", or wikis had been known as "Wikipedia clones"? [Yes, I know, not the originators of the species, but surely the ones the most people are familiar with.] I don't think they'd have nearly the traction on the web that they do now, as the media wouldn't be caught dead talking about the "Wordpress clone usage and participation phenomenon" without being payed off. If there was a non-trademarked, one-to-two syllable name one could use to describe both Reddit and HN, I think we'd see the usage shoot up.

Social bookmarking site?

maybe social web surfing? delicious is social bookmarking.

i guess it depends how one uses reddit though.

I think that's a little too broad of a category. That conveys the sharing of links, but not the voting and comments, which I feel are the defining features of reddit.

News.Arc ? Isn't all of hacker news written in a lisp variant thats only a few hundred lines long?

and also suffers from scalability too. How many times have you accessed this site and got a connection error? Scalability and all that other work requires code.

Looks like it contains an XSS bug in the way it reports errors.

That seems to be missing a few features, like accounts.

I wonder when this article format will bump against ridiculous limits.

"RabbitMQ clone in 4 lines of Go in 13 seconds".

Right on. And I can write a word processor in one mouse click. (OK maybe a double-click.)

And he saves the data where? And he filters the bad words where? And he....

Ignore the 'Reddit clone' part and enjoy the code.

Proof that you can't build a great product with clever programming alone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com