RethinkDB is switching over to Lisp

[coffeemug]

http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/04/rethinkdb-is-switching-over-to-lisp/

[shin_lao]

Am I the only one to find April fools boring?

[runevault → shin_lao]

For the most part I agree, few take the effort to do something actually funny/impressive.

So far the only ones I've seen this year that impressed me are Google Annotation Galery, Youtube, xkcd, and fourwalls from attalasoft

[Flow → shin_lao]

Every 1st of April, the net goes completely shit. :(

[alrex021]

As we’re preparing to open source our Lisp code base, I’m happy to kick off the effort by listing the last few lines of the source code in this post:

  ))))))))
  )))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
  )))))))))))
  )))
  )

Thats just classic.

[jgrahamc → alrex021]

No, it's not. It's lame. If you are going to do an April Fools joke make an effort. That was done without thinking at all.

[apgwoz → jgrahamc]

The thing that sort of pisses me off about this too, is that Slava is a proponent of Common Lisp (weblocks, cl-cont, various essays). Plus, there's no reason that Common Lisp couldn't be used for a high end database product--AllegroGraph is written in Lisp.

[coffeemug → apgwoz]

It's a form of tough love. I only mock things (and people) I care about. Just ask my girlfriend. Or my cofounder.

[apgwoz → coffeemug]

Fair enough!

[lsb]

You don't need a low-level language like C for the query planner and SQL parser.

Linspire is doing OS development in Haskell http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1506 and SQLite, with it's 45MLoC of test code for its 67 KLoC of source code, tests a lot of memory allocation bugs. http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

The bigger question is, even though these guys are selling a software package that's probably never going open-source, how long until we use compiled high-level-languages instead of C, just like C replaced assembler?

[lurkerperpetual → lsb]

Linspire has stopped existing for quite some time now.

[dpapathanasiou]

Before I'd read the article, I thought it was plausible, since one of the rethink guys also runs defmacro.org.

With the iPad-alooza in the air, a better joke would have been that they're switching all their dev work to the iPad/iPhone SDK.

[lenni]

They nearly got me... I didn't click until the parapgraph before the parenthesis joke.

[Flow]

slava.respect--;

[PG-13]

This day always makes me respect The Onion a whole lot more. It takes a lot of talent to what they do as well as they do it.

[kiba]

April fool?