> Reddit could have switched to a paid Common Lisp variant without any trouble if they'd actually had issues.
I thought they had issues. Didn't they?
Paid Common Lisp variants tend to get expensive and even for those, the main applications rarely were high-traffic websites with UI frameworks.
Take ITA Software / Google, they were developing core business logic of the flight search engine in Lisp - the product than ran/runs in SBCL. They had a team of 100+ people and a bunch of the top Lisp talent of that time. They also invested a lot into improving SBCL.
> Sony wanted to be able to move devs between projects easily and everything else used C++, so they'd rather force Naughty Dog to use C++ than tell everyone else to learn Common Lisp. To my knowledge, there was zero discussion on the merits of one or the other and it was a business call.
A business call is based on assumptions: larger ecosystem, more libraries, shared runtimes, etc. That's all much more economical than doing it alone as a small studio.
> Further, the reams of custom code Naughty Dog now has written on Racket points to them still loving lisp and not minding if they have to invest a lot of effort into being able to use it in their designs.
Of course they love Scheme and they were then back creating their own content delivery tools. But they stopped implementing runtime things like core 3d graphics animation frameworks for new CPUs/GPUs, etc.
Things were more complicated than that with Reddit from what I've read (and from a now defunct blog post they wrote not to mention various talks and interviews from devs who were there at the time).
Their devs were using Macs in 2005 which ran on PowerPC. Their servers were x86, but running FreeBSD (honestly, that was a tall ask for most languages in 2005). They had an issue finding threading libraries that worked on that OSX/PPC and FBSD/x86 combo. They further complained that there weren't tons of libraries available for use either. Finally, they also made some bad architecture decisions unrelated to Lisp.
The switch is still a weird one if you move aside from the new team not knowing or wanting to learn Lisp. Python isn't threaded at all, so they could have stuck with non-threaded CL and still have had 100x faster code. Likewise, they wound up rewriting all the python libraries they were using because those libraries turned out to have tons of issues too.
I thought they had issues. Didn't they?
Paid Common Lisp variants tend to get expensive and even for those, the main applications rarely were high-traffic websites with UI frameworks.
Take ITA Software / Google, they were developing core business logic of the flight search engine in Lisp - the product than ran/runs in SBCL. They had a team of 100+ people and a bunch of the top Lisp talent of that time. They also invested a lot into improving SBCL.
> Sony wanted to be able to move devs between projects easily and everything else used C++, so they'd rather force Naughty Dog to use C++ than tell everyone else to learn Common Lisp. To my knowledge, there was zero discussion on the merits of one or the other and it was a business call.
A business call is based on assumptions: larger ecosystem, more libraries, shared runtimes, etc. That's all much more economical than doing it alone as a small studio.
> Further, the reams of custom code Naughty Dog now has written on Racket points to them still loving lisp and not minding if they have to invest a lot of effort into being able to use it in their designs.
Of course they love Scheme and they were then back creating their own content delivery tools. But they stopped implementing runtime things like core 3d graphics animation frameworks for new CPUs/GPUs, etc.