Re: Lisp, the secret weapon.

From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Sat Apr 28 2001 - 16:30:34 PDT


Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:

> I wrote a distributed hypermedia system (with real P2P
> before it was cool) with shared whiteboard, shared
> history etc. which was *secure*, in 1992-1994.
>
> The interaction with the system (networking, X,
> etc.) was all written as extensions to a LISP engine. The messages
> the system sent back and forth was LISP (which, if you switched
> "()" for "<></>" looked a lot like XML).

Why'd you roll your own instead of using Winterp? I mean sure,
everybody who gets into Lisp has to write their own interpreter at
some point (I know I did) but... ;-) David Betz kicked total ass.
Wonder whatever happened to him?

My own first, "real" Lisp project was building an interface between
Sun's and Kodak's customer service management systems; we built a
transparent "bridge" that spanned Sun's and Kodak's service incident
DBs and kept them in sync on shared trouble tickets. Worked by
sending little verifiable Lisp (Scheme, really) chunks (really, just
datastructures) back and forth via e-mail, slurping them into an
interpreter / engine / server and then turning them into appropriate
transactions on the system. Now that you mention it, yeah, very
XMLish. I think they rewrote it to use some more obtuse syntax a few
years after I left...

$0.02,

jb



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