The first version of Reddit was written in Common Lisp, but less than a year later, they reluctantly migrated to Python because Python had a bigger library ecosystem:
- They tried using some commercial Lisp on a platform where it was poorly supported, and were struggling with certain stability issues (I don't remember the details).
- A team member came on board who, what do you know, had also authored the Python-based web framework that they were using in the rewrite. Reddit may have been used as the "guinea pig" for improving this web framework.
Sorry, I misremembered all that. It's hard to find the original information. One of the devs revealed that he was working OpenMCL on a Mac ... but then Reddit was actually running with CMUCL on FreeBSD. (Yes, really!) He couldn't basically even run all of Reddit in the dev environment.
(Regarding "commerical Lisp"; that's what some Lisp people were saying should have been given consideration.)
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[ 44.7 ms ] story [ 1047 ms ] threadhttps://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...
It also sounds like they were very much a polyglot shop.
Circle CI is apparently written in Clojure.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160803061607/http://www.reddit...
- They tried using some commercial Lisp on a platform where it was poorly supported, and were struggling with certain stability issues (I don't remember the details).
- A team member came on board who, what do you know, had also authored the Python-based web framework that they were using in the rewrite. Reddit may have been used as the "guinea pig" for improving this web framework.
(Regarding "commerical Lisp"; that's what some Lisp people were saying should have been given consideration.)
Technical overview of Kandria, a game and game engine developed in Common Lisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32043026 - July 2022 (32 comments)
[1] https://chromotopy.org/latex/papers/quilc.pdf
I'm surprised so many projects stuck with it, especially since their VCS servers were so slow during that time, too.