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Comment by Pmop | Hacker News Reader

Kind off-topic but related: sometimes I wonder how web development would be if Lisp had somehow won as standard, since we can use to do everything the stack HTML+CSS+JS+Backend-language does, in addition to standardized syntax and standard everything.

Oh, standards. Standards.

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We were so close. Twice, JavaScript had a chance to be Scheme; both times marketing reasons prevailed (first, to capitalize on the marketing spending of Java; later, to compete against Microsoft's JScript).

If Scheme was the language of the web, then HTML and CSS being represented as s-expressions would be the most obvious next steps, and we'd be like 15 years ahead in terms of progress.

Marketing and popularity aren’t unrelated.

Popularity can be faked through marketing.

Popularity can only be faked via shills and poll rigging. Perhaps you mean something else?

You say that like marketing and shilling are two wholly distinct activities. Have you heard of Instagram?

One is people pretending to like something or wrongly saying people like something. The other is people liking something for the wrong reasons. These are completely two different concepts.

Popularity is created through marketing.

From Racket [1]:

    #lang web-server/insta
    (define (start request)
      (response/xexpr
       '(html
         (head (title "My Blog"))
         (body (h1 "Under construction")))))

[1] - https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/index.html

And given this site, I suppose a link to arc/anarki is relevant too:

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/apps/news/...

We would probably just treat the html as data, that is normal lisp. So no syntax changes. Same for css I guess. Maybe in twenty years.

Next best thing today: https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup#syntax, https://github.com/noprompt/garden#syntax

Or PostScript.

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