Lisp anxieties

From: Chris Capel (ch.ris_at_iba.nktech.net)
Date: 09/19/04 

Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 12:58:32 -0500

Ever since Dan B. mentioned it on his diary, I've been really wondering what
some experienced Lispers thought of the PHP language. Wait. Take that back.
I know what Lispers will say about PHP. It's a joke. Not worth mentioning.
As Dan said, (paraphrasing) "it doesn't even have a good Emacs mode".
Except...

I have a special interest in PHP. It's been proved to be able to reliably
handle the traffic for very large sites. I'm programming a web site in
lisp, but I keep having this nagging worry that I'm going to regret
choosing the language if/when my site's membership grows to be 5,000-50,000
or so. Will lisp be able to handle that sort of load without me having to
know how to hack a webserver, or debug socket issues, or something esoteric
like that, or depend on project maintainers to do them? I guess it would
reassure me to see a really big site that runs mainly on lisp.

Viaweb doesn't count. I'm probably not nearly as smart as Paul Graham.
Orbitz doesn't count. It's just a backend. It deals with entirely different
issues that something like Cliki does. And Cliki doesn't have (as far as I
know) lots and lots of traffic.

PHP does handle those kind of loads (though it does need things like
precompilers and such) and does it regularly. (According to Troutgirl at
Friendster, it does it better than java.) Lisp is sort of a question mark
here for me, though. I've heard a lot about Lisp the Language's wonders,
but not about /implementations'/ performance and reliability in these
situations.

I think this is a special case of the more general "Microsoft anxiety" that
particularly affects developers, like me, that have grown up using
Microsoft software--OS, dev. tools, etc. The perception is, with MS, /or/
any other widely used platform, that even if something doesn't work, it's
either /your/ fault, or a hundred people have already had the problem and
have posted workarounds on the web, so you're never going to be screwed (at
least by the software itself). But, in me, it's a very deep-rooted
attitude, and it manifests itself as a fear of doing anything substantial
in a language that isn't already doing something substantial is substantial
circumstances. I'm disappointed in myself, because Lisp is the greatest,
and I'd love to have a site running in lisp, and I don't think I really
have any /rational/ fears concerning it.

Hmm.

Chris Capel 

--
"Even my anxieties have anxieties." --Charlie Brown

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