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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Another reason you won't find people using string templates to produce HTML in Lisp is that no one uses it for web development. This phenomenon where multiple language features conspire to prevent misuse is called defense in depth and is one of the great strengths of the language.

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Except, you know, the site you are using right now, and a large number of sites that use Clojure/Clojurescript.

I could type a single open parenthesis and blow up this whole site.

this trolling would be funnier if you didn't obviously spend so much time posting here

Ironically, the dominant solution for dynamic HTML in Clojure apps, Hiccup, does not rely on macros as much as it relies on keyword and collection literals.

Historically, web development is among the most noteworthy uses of Lisp in business. Reddit and PG's work come to mind.

Reddit ran away from lisp as fast as it could once the original goal of using the language (to secure funding from YCombinator) had been met.

I don't think that's an accurate representation.

They were merged with another company. Reddit guys knew both Lisp and Python. Other company coders only knew Python.

Since then, they've had massive issues scaling Python in general and their ORM dependence in particular.

Reddit apparently ran away from Lisp primarily because all the servers ran on FreeBSD while development ran on Macs and because at the time they were forced to use different Common Lisp implementations (OpenMCL on Mac and CMUCL on FreeBSD) so they couldn't even test what they were deploying, essentially. Today with SBCL that wouldn't have been an issue.

Right, today there would be some other issue.

Don't be so sure. People who want to develop and sort-of-test with one stack, and then deploy on another, will find a way to do it in 2023.

I've been on reddit since the beginning when it was effectively a lisp-weenie site (clued into its existence by pg (discovered via his blub essay)).

It migrated to python very early in the game (via Aaron Swartz (rip)), and it's my understanding that it was that move that allowed them to scale it.

> Another reason you won't find people using string templates to produce HTML in Lisp is that no one uses it for web development

...how does this change conditional probability? If of those people who use Lisp for web development, nobody uses strings, it's unrelated to how many people use Lisp for web development.

> This phenomenon where multiple language features conspire to prevent ~~misuse~~ use is called defense in depth and is one of the great strengths of the language.

I kid, I kid. Lisp is great.

Reasonably sure this was already the parent's joke

Ah, slow this morning.

Not only do they use it for web development, but they manage to regularly update and upgrade their Lisp based web apps (as opposed to ignoring customer emails because their pile of PHP/Perl is too hairy to debug).

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