[BeautifulSynch]

Something was bugging me about this article the first time I read it, so I made a mind map.

Turns out, not once does the author actually give a reason why Python was better than Lisp for Reddit. The only references to that connection at all were claims that some “X” (all among the set that are oft-refuted by Lisp programmers) wasn’t the reason!

It reads more like a PR justification (“oh, there’s not much difference really, we even asked unspecified engineers who agreed with the change, and our code is working better and better!”) than an actual explanation.

[hello_computer]

"less code that ran faster" seems fairly clear-cut to me. Why would he lie about that?

[BeautifulSynch]

As I understand his claims, “less code that ran faster” was after switching from existing web frameworks to web.py, a from-scratch web framework he wrote himself to ‘do the right thing, simply’ (as all the best frameworks do).

The decision to write web.py instead of web.lisp was not elaborated on, however.

As mentioned above, the closest point I see to him discussing that decision is saying that ‘Python uses objects to make frameworks somewhat like the syntactic constructs Lisp allows you to make’, ie ‘you can do the same things as Lisp less easily in Python, so that’s not an advantage of Lisp’. Which is both incoherent as a refutation of the referenced reason to keep Lisp, and not a reason for the change to Python.

[hello_computer]

Read it again:

"THE PYTHON VERSION had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain."

[ungamedplayer]

That's actually really direct. It appears as though they had python rewrite had more familiarity with the programmers so they had an easier time writing it.

I come from the opposite side and find python syntax and style stifling.

[hello_computer]

Instead of an ordinary blub like python, they should have doubled-down, went full-retard, and used PHP. For web work in those days, it probably would have been even faster... even easier to read and maintain.