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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Excuse my French, but... if this hadn't been written by an internet celeb, nobody would have given two shits about it.

The thing with internet celebs in the programming community is that they mostly are celebrities for a reason and not just because they are the pretty daughter of some billionaire.

Zed is not the pretty daughter of a billionaire?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Pretty much.

Oh, except, there's actually an interesting idea in there if you look really closely.

Isn't the interesting idea basically CGI?

If you can abstract everything to be anything then nothing has meaning.

Lovely bit o' philosophy there. no sarcasm

Depending on how much you want to reduce it, you can dismiss almost anything having to do with a webserver this way. Some more powerful versions that dismiss any and all computer related ideas that have output:

    - But isn't that just calling a bunch of syscalls?
    - But isn't that just moving a bunch of bytes around?

Well, yes, but I picked CGI for a reason. Zed says in one of the other comments that the inspiration for this was "What if PHP got it right?" PHP came out of a long tradition of CGI apps, as a way to make templating dead-simple and still provide a bunch of programming language tools.

The brilliant idea behind CGI is that you set a directory as your cgi-bin, drop an executable file, and then the webserver will run that executable and pass in a bunch of data from the request as environment variables and on STDIN, and then send STDOUT back to the browser. It's an incredibly powerful idea with a really simple implementation. You can write your scripts in any language, they can do anything, they can present further abstractions and run other scripts, they can embed other languages like Python or PHP or Haskell, and they can embed other frameworks like Django or Rails. And all you have to do is drop a file in a directory and make it executable. All because of the power of plain text: CGI "speaks" a uniform interface that any computer language can understand.

When I saw FuqIt, I thought of CGI because the brilliant idea behind FuqIt seems to be "Drop a Python file or Jinja template in a directory, and we'll call it via a uniform interface". Kinda like CGI, huh, except it's restricted to Python? (Actually, there's another standard - WSGI - that's built around the same principles as CGI but restricted to Python.)

This is the best explanation of CGI I've encountered so far.

But you were downplaying the project because it is "basically CGI" (inaccurate already). In context I think you'll find you were being hostile about the matter.

Anyway, it is the start of an idea with a proclaimed possible direction (basic error handling, basic web server functionality). It doesn't do a lot right now (and maybe it never will) but it isn't just CGI.

More than one, probably?

  base, ext = os.path.splitext(name[1:])

If that code is an idea, then the idea is "HACK AWAY!"

I think you can run python modules installed in the system through this framework.

Yup, and expose any file on the file system.

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