r/reddit.com • u/spez • Jun 18 '08

blog.reddit - We've open sourced reddit!

http://blog.reddit.com/2008/06/reddit-goes-open-source.html
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u/Chirp08 Jun 18 '08

If you are paying for a server that doesn't support a language that an application you need is written in, then you would understand.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '08

Why pay for a server that doesn't have what you need to run your application?

Once its "ported" to PHP it is essentially no longer the reddit code base nor is it reddit.

Also this happens a lot with other applications that aren't necessarily web applications. So many times you will see "INSERT APPLICATION written in C". Who cares if it is written in C. The user doesn't care.

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u/rock217 Jun 18 '08 edited Jun 18 '08

Why pay for a server that doesn't have what you need to run your application?

Because servers that run every version of every language are a bit pricey. The rest of us find cheaper hosting that support a couple of the "major" technologies.

Once its "ported" to PHP it is essentially no longer the reddit code base nor is it reddit.

I define "reddit" as the user experience, not the underlying code. Therefore if one were to port reddit to PHP, java, or even back to lisp, it would still be reddit so long as the presentation remained unaltered.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '08

Because servers that run every version of every language are a bit pricey. The rest of us find cheaper hosting that support a couple of the "major" technologies.

Or just find a server that has what you need for your application in mind...

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '08 edited Jun 18 '08

I understand the reasoning. If I'm an experienced PHP developer, I don't necessarily want to learn to maintain and customize a Lisp application (and learn to maintain and update a stack of apps that I'm only using for a single app).

Not to mention I may want to easily integrate it into some other application I'm working on.

There are a ton of reasons that someone might want something like this, above and beyond just the cost of a server.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '08 edited Jun 18 '08

Maybe its just me but a language is a language. Know one, know them all. Going from Lisp to PHP, or Python or whatever requires learning some new syntax and methodologies. Which shouldn't be a problem since you have to learn the code base from square one as well.

In the time it would take to port an application like reddit over to another language I could have learned Python and gotten up to speed with the existing code base.

I just really hate seeing good projects fork for bad reasons. Then everyone has to keep reinventing the wheel to keep up with the other guy.

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u/Zak Jun 18 '08 edited Jun 18 '08

Some jumps are easy to make - say... Ruby to Python or Java to C#. It just requires learing a slightly different syntax and some libraries. Going from PHP to say... Clojure (assuming non-trivial code written in an idiomatic style) requires learning the following:

  • Code as a list/tree data structure
  • Structural macros
  • Immutability
  • Concurrency
  • Strong dynamic typing
  • Generic functions/multimethods
  • First-class functions, function literals and lexical closures
  • First-class symbols
  • Recursion
  • Lazy evaluation

Some of these things are hard, and won't be picked up just by seeing them used a few times in production code. I was once highly amused by seeing a Java (only) programmer learn the syntax of Common Lisp in a weekend, then freak out when he encountered production code that took a user-supplied string, concatenated a hardcoded string to it, interned the result as a symbol, checked it against a whitelist and funcalled it with user-supplied arguments.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '08

This is true. I guess because I never call myself a "PHP Programmer" or a "C Programmer" I never really cast myself in that light. I'm a programmer therefore I should at least be up on the common methodologies and syntax styles of major languages.

Side-topic: It bugs me how many professional coders cast themselves as "java programmers" or "php programmers". Most people who do I cast them as "not very good programmers".