Comment by sedachv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sedachv | Hacker News Reader

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The ironic thing is that you were doing it during the 90s, which is possibly the worst time to be a Lisp programmer ever and Lisp's "lost decade." Everything that came out of Symbolics got thrown away (RMS turned out to have been 100% right about that), no one was doing free software libraries except for Haible and Steingold (ok, huge exaggeration), and aside from CL-HTTP everyone completely dropped the ball on the whole web thing (AllegroServe only came out in 2000!).

What are you doing right now with Ruby? I remember a couple of years ago at a CRACL meeting the conversation turned to Naughty Dog, and someone (I think it was Chris Baker) was like "Oh yeah, Andy lives in LA. He's writing books now."

The only programming I'm doing at the exact moment are little hacking projects. But I did a whole bunch of backend "cloud" programming in 2006-2008, and I used Ruby for most of it. This included 90% of the backend for Flektor.com (now deceased -- but successful in that it was cool and we sold it to Fox) and all the backend stuff for Monkey Gods (monkeygods.com). At Flektor I actually started the backend in Lisp. At first ACL. Then they wanted thousands per server -- haha. Then we ported to CMUCL. But there were no libraries, and those we had were buggy. Even the MySql integration was buggy. The last thing you want is a flakey database library.

We switched to Ruby. Sure ActiveRecord was buggy too, but in a totally different way. The bugs didn't crash it, or put weird data into the tables -- they merely generated sloppy or incorrect queries (this was 2006). I could spot these and work around. And there were libraries for a LOT of stuff. Fixing bugs in the libraries was easy too.

Ruby also seems to have been designed as a practical language. There is a bit of distain in the Lisp world (or used to be) for I/O, as if it's dirty. Look at Scheme, it doesn't even have I/O in the spec (or didn't last time I looked). I/O is inherently a side effect, which to the functional thinker is BAD! Well I have news. Writing real programs is all about I/O.

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