A discourse on web-frameworks

* Zeus would rather write his own.

<Pandora> your own what?

<Zeus> Web framework.

<Pandora> I don't know what that is

<Zeus> Pandora: An app that takes care of the glue for web applications

<Pandora> what is the glue?

<Zeus> Pandora: Well, you need a webserver, usually a templating system, a nice interface to the information provided to the webserver, a way of routing URLs to specific modules, &c.

<Pandora> why make it so complicated?

<Zeus> Pandora: As opposed to what?

<Pandora> simple

<Zeus> How do you propose making it simple?

<Zeus> Pandora: There's a lot of bookkeeping involved in any web app of a decent size

<Pandora> what sort of bookkeeping?

<Zeus> Forgetting, for a moment, the issues of making a webserver (say you're using FastCGI with Apache or something), having bits of HTML scattered through your program really isn't a neat way of doing things, and it becomes completely unmanageable very fast for applications of any appreciable size

<Pandora> ok so you need lisp macros

* Zeus laughs.

<Pandora> am I wrong?

<Pandora> what's funny

<Zeus> Pandora: Do it and show me.

<Pandora> Zeus: I still don't know what's funny

<Zeus> If you tried it, you would.

<Pandora> Zeus: exactly what is it I have not tried?

<Zeus> Apparently, designing any kind of large web application :-)

<Pandora> Zeus: that is the problem right there, you are complicating things

* Zeus laughs.

<Pandora> Zeus: Why would anybody write a large program instead of a small simple one?

<Zeus> Er, because as great as the UNIX philosophy may be, sometimes people need an application that does more than a single string transformation.

<Zeus> I direct you, for example, to http://www.amazon.com/

<Pandora> Zeus: Right, and there is the false assumption, there's no reason a program that does more than a single string transform has to be complicated

<Zeus> I see

<Zeus> So how do you propose offering the features of Amazon without the program being complicated?

<Pandora> Zeus: You're only asking me that so you can laugh again

<Zeus> Of course.

<Zeus> That would be why you didn't answer this question last time, either? :-)