(Re)writing Reddit in Lisp Movie
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Sven Van Caekenberghe (who created the LispWorks HTTP Client/Server movie a couple of days ago) has released a new Lisp movie! It's called "Episode 2: (Re)writing Reddit in Lisp in 20 minutes and 100 lines" and he describes it as follows:
"This movie is a tutorial on building web applications using KPAX, implementing a prototype clone of Reddit, sort of anyway.
We show how to use the KPAX Common Lisp Web Application Framework to implement an example that is quite similar to Reddit: a collection of links is presented, sorted by points and sorted chronologically, a form allows for new links to be submitted and links can be voted up or down. We show how to interactively debug web applications. Finally we add a stylesheet to give our little application a better look (thanks to Nicky Peeters). Furthermore we show how Common Lisp allows you to write elegant code, elegantly: flexibly re-using similar code fragments, as well as developing and testing incrementally. Source code for this example: either the syntax colored HTML version for viewing, or the raw LISP code."
There have been a number of Lisp Reddit look-a-likes in the past few weeks:
- Marc Battyani started the trend when he suggested on c.l.l. that it would be fun to write a better version of Reddit in Lisp (after Reddit announced that they had re-written Reddit in Python). Marc's own version (created using his web application framework - see the bottom of this post for some additional details on his framework) is here (the source for the app is here). His version is a pretty complete and feature-rich re-implemenation of Reddit. In fact, it is probably more correct to describe it as a superset of Reddit as Marc introduced comments to his version (before Reddit did) and also added tags (which Reddit doesn't yet support).
- William Bland developed another Lisp-based Reddit clone called Quickit (a description and the source code is here) that is built using Araneida. His version doesn't attempt to be a full clone of Reddit but just shows what can be achieved in Lisp in an hour!
- Sven's movie describes how he used his own KPAX web application framework to develop a partial Reddit clone. Although not complete, it does contain most of the "essential" elements that people associate with Reddit and achieves a lot in just 20 minutes and 100 lines of code!
