How did python help, I always just assumed it was chosen to allow the hiring of more programmers, not that it provides any technical benefit above lisp.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit
"The others knew Lisp (they wrote their whole site in it) and they knew Python (they rewrote their whole site in it) and yet they decided liked Python better for this project. The Python version had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain."
Turns out, not once does the author actually give a reason why Python was better than Lisp for Reddit. The only references to that connection at all were claims that some “X” (all among the set that are oft-refuted by Lisp programmers) wasn’t the reason!
It reads more like a PR justification (“oh, there’s not much difference really, we even asked unspecified engineers who agreed with the change, and our code is working better and better!”) than an actual explanation.
The decision to write web.py instead of web.lisp was not elaborated on, however.
As mentioned above, the closest point I see to him discussing that decision is saying that ‘Python uses objects to make frameworks somewhat like the syntactic constructs Lisp allows you to make’, ie ‘you can do the same things as Lisp less easily in Python, so that’s not an advantage of Lisp’. Which is both incoherent as a refutation of the referenced reason to keep Lisp, and not a reason for the change to Python.
"THE PYTHON VERSION had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain."
I come from the opposite side and find python syntax and style stifling.
for example he dosent make any claim about the python implementation being "far easier to read and maintain" (even by proxy by claiming that CL was hard to read/maintain), and honestly starts out by absolutely singing CL's praises
his reasoning seems to boil more down to the ecosystem surrounding Common Lisps libraries being poorer than pythons:
> If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand.
[etc...]
> So why Python?
We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. In most cases, the Lisp code translated very easily into Python. Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn. It's been fun so far, so we'll see where it takes us.
We are still in that world. I do game programming, and am convinced that if a game programmer isn't aware of their memory allocations, then their game will drop frames. This is true today, even at 60hz (and things are moving towards 144hz, 240hz, and beyond). Reusing buffers is essential.
I think that being aware of when and where your memory comes from is the foundation of performance. The discipline of handling memory carefully tends to naturally lead toward making more performant decisions on everything else.
Separately, my gut feeling is that in 2024, programming language runtime technology is advanced enough that manually reusing buffers isn't necessarily a good use of hours-spent-optimizing. To pick on Python in particular, it _does_ actually reuse buffers when they only have a single owner; more languages might get this in the future via the Perceus refcounting work?