Rob Nagler wrote: > I think Yahoo Stores is written in Lisp. I also believe it handles > the front and back end. Would be interesting to know why this was > left out of the discussion.
Yahoo store was originally ViaWeb and was written in Common Lisp. It was one of the first large applications made available over the web. Paul Graham has an article about it at http://www.paulgraham.com/paulgraham/avg.html ViaWeb was deployed using clisp, a very portable, but somewhat incomplete, common lisp implementation that compiles lisp to bytecode. I believe (take this with a grain of salt, as it's third hand) that ViaWeb only presented dynamic content to the merchant, not to the user of the merchant's site- it was a web application that built static web sites. Each merchant had their own dedicated lisp listener to nteract with. This probably isn't the model that Yahoo had in mind, and it might not have occured to them that the commercial Lisps have native threads. Using clisp would also obscure one of the big advantages to using lisp- many lisp implementations compile to native code, so they're very efficient. Also, I'd imagine that you can hire just about any programmer to work on a PHP system; even if they haven't seen PHP before they'll pick it up quickly (once they get used to the weird reference semantics), and most of the work will be in learning the libraries. Graham's system uses macros extensively, and from other code of his that I've read (Graham wrote a couple of books about Lisp), I'd bet that he uses recursion and mapping functions a lot as well. I think it would be harder to hire people to work on his system (of course you'd probably also get more experienced people, so that might not be such a bad thing). Tagore Smith
