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by imperator 5988 days ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot
1 comments

We had one in our demo store for Viaweb, a version of which still seems to exist, probably unbeknown to Yahoo: http://store.yahoo.com/acme/teapot.html
Are they still running your code? I'd curious to know more of the history of Viaweb between 1999 and now. Is the architecture still the same (CLisp backed by files)?

I'm curious from a "how good is Lisp long term" angle.

The code later got translated into C++. However, we had a template language for describing pages that was basically Common Lisp with a few macros. These templates are stored on disk as s-expressions. They couldn't change the template language because some users had created their own. So the C++ version literally had to read Lisp programs off disk and execute them. I.e. it was a Lisp interpreter.

That's what I was talking about at the time when I described it somewhere as a new world record for Greenspun's tenth rule.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule

That's hilarious! :-)
Our favorite was the one-way telephone, which still lives as a meme at YC. http://store.yahoo.com/acme/phone.html