Well, a new year, and (finally) a new post. In the past two weeks I have undertaken a complete rewrite of Project Posner from Common Lisp to Ruby on Rails. Now, before the Lispniks descend upon me with their sharp parenthetical barbs, allow me to explain. The Common Lisp version was never anything more than a cheap hack: a few hundred lines of code that crawls through a few tens of megabytes of plain-text documents and spits out about the same amount of HTML. It’s completely off-line, static, Web 0.5 stuff. For a search engine I used ht://Dig, whose last release was in 2004. All that being said, Common Lisp was a great language for doing it, and definitely made the process easier and more fun than it would have been in any other language.
But I want to move on with a more sophisticated search, more dynamic features (highlighting search terms and personal search histories to name just two), and, of course, AJAX! I could do all that in Common Lisp. Several people have successfully done so. But many hundreds more have done so with Ruby. With Rails, half the work is already done for me. I don’t have to think about how to connect to a database or even how to name my files. Someone else has already done that work. When I had a problem with Rails dropping MySQL connections on Ubuntu, Google delivered a one-command solution on the first try. Compare that with the endless speculation and one-upsmanship that might accompany such a query on comp.lang.lisp.
So any distaste I may have for Ruby’s syntax is completely overcome by my delight at Rails’ helpfulness. I’d still rather be working in Lisp, but Ruby is good enough, and Rails is better. It is not the path of least resistance — would that be PHP? — but it is the path of least work. As someone wrote, if Lisp’s audience had been harried sysadmins rather than AI researchers, it’d rule the world by now.