reddit1.0

A few years ago I sent a message to spez on Reddit asking if he'd ever open source the original Lisp version of Reddit. He actually responded and said he couldn't find it, but then a while later it was indeed released. I like to think maybe I contributed to the butterfly effect of that happening. https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367241

It's slightly different: Naughty Dog had proven that they can deliver commercial successful applications (novel platform games on the Playstation with excellent content) using Lisp. They had their own IDE on top of Common Lisp and as a delivery vehicle a Scheme-like runtime. They were bought by a much larger C++-Shop (Sony) and were trying to get the benefits from a larger eco-system. In the end they were bought for their talent, their experience, their brand - but not for their technology. For Naughty Dog it could also have been the right moment, since from a certain point in time the game platforms are getting so complex that making custom inhouse game runtimes may no longer make sense for smaller game studios. Reddit OTOH had never delivered anything commercially successful in Lisp, little experience with Lisp, but heard that it could

Might not count as modern, but the original Reddit and HackerNews codebases: - https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 - https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Before the Python rewrite it was written on Common Lisp: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

The first version of reddit also used a single PostgreSQL instance apparently: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0/blob/bb4fbdb5871...

As a lisper, I’ve gone through the code of the original site ( https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 ) and it’s not surprising to me that they had to rewrite it: it does a bunch of interesting environment-dependent things during compilation and loading that make it really hard to even attempt to run. I’m also fairly certain that rewriting in lisp would have been nearly as successful: the benefit came more from learning about the problem space than from switching languages.

The first version of Reddit was developed in Common Lisp. Here's the source code: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

Heh. If you see [1], they define a function called "user-email" (spelled correctly). The lisp convention here would be to define the accessor as something like "%user-email." While the code isn't too bad, these little things betray a lack of knowledge of lisp lore. Perhaps another reason for the rewrite was that the team actually didn't have much experience writing lisp code. [1] https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0/blob/bb4fbdb5871...

It's fun to look at the ASDF system definition: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0/blob/master/redd... Some Ediware in the dependencies (CL-PPCRE, CL-WHO and Hunchentoot from back when it was called TBNL). I guess they used CL-SQL rather than Postmodern because the latter didn't exist back then. Should be reasonably easy to get it running on a modern CL.

I chuckled over this bit of lines [1]. Fortunately (for Reddit) this name is being consistently used throughout the code. Can't guess why. (email :type string :accessor user-emai) [1] https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0/blob/bb4fbdb5871...

Maybe having it be open source would represent a security risk? https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0/blob/master/data...

Scraping the /popular page on del.icio.us: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0/blob/master/scra... del.icio.us/popular used to be very similar to Hacker News as a source of fresh web-scene-relevant article flow. Between /popular, and per-tag RSS feeds, in some ways del.icio.us used to be a better Reddit than current Reddit. Tags and tag feeds were a very flexible way to monitor interest topics. What is now a network of reposts between subreddits, used to just be the addition of tags. Saving a bookmark to your own set of bookmarks also served as an "upvote". This created a nice incentive alignment; if something was interesting, you would want to keep track of it, and add it to your collection, with the tags relevant to you! Because del.icio.us was not explicitly designed as a "hype machine" like reddit, it turned over a lot of r