Comments on: Lisp Bazaar

By: Tom Elam

Tom Elam — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:52:48 +0000

I believe the information that Yahoo! Stores doesn’t use Lisp is false. They still do, according to relatively recent information. They replaced as much as they could with C++ because they were ‘afraid of Lisp’. Here’s a nice write-up about what happened after Yahoo! bought ViaWeb:

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html

By: Ram Krishnan

Ram Krishnan — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 06:40:51 +0000

I guess the short answer is, Lisp is what we were most proficient with.

I did play with “Ruby on Rails” a while back, and found it interesting, but not compelling enough. Besides, when it comes to building extensible abstractions, nothing beats Lisp; the power of Lisp macros becomes abundantly evident when building web apps and web services (check out Will Glozer’s blog entry on Syntactic Abstraction at http://cafespot-dev.blogspot.com/2005/08/syntactic-abstraction.html).

Also, the fact that SBCL has a native optimizing compiler and support for native threads were important considerations in our decision as well.

By: Swaroop

Swaroop — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:20:28 +0000

@Ram Krishnan: Why did you choose Lisp? It’s a very interesting decision that you chose it instead of Ruby on Rails, etc… I’m looking forward to your (any) forthcoming writings .

Also, do tell us about your system design as well.

By: Ram Krishnan

Ram Krishnan — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 07:43:08 +0000

Delighted to see the interest in the technology behind podbazaar.com. Yes, we are indeed using Common Lisp to build the entire application. As an when time permits, I will try to write more about our system design as well as how we’ve leveraged Lisp in our application.

In the meantime, you might want to take a look at Will Gozer’s blog on the development of CafeSpot.net, another web application written entirely in Common Lisp (http://cafespot-dev.blogspot.com/). We were certainly impressed and inspired by his work.

Disclaimer: I’m one of the principals at Podbazaar.

By: Swaroop

Swaroop — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 17:46:19 +0000

@Aarthi: What’s cooler is that I didn’t know such modern database wrapper libraries and regular expression libraries existed for CLisp

@Pramod: I’m curious on how the code looks like, as well.

By: Pramod Biligiri

Pramod Biligiri — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 07:11:31 +0000

Wow! I wonder how the code for a Lisp based web app looks like, considering the language is supposed to be so good.

By: Aarthi

Aarthi — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 19:13:52 +0000

Cool! I didn’t know this!

By: Swaroop

Swaroop — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 11:22:14 +0000

@Manu:

Does Yahoo! Store. still use Lisp ?

Nope, that was a *long* time ago. It’s probably PHP now.

By: Manu

Manu — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 08:43:34 +0000

Amazing !

Does Yahoo! Store. still use Lisp ?