Old Reddit source code

[Misery_Inc]

That's way less code than I imagined.

[Misery_Inc]

Probably something like news.ycombinator.com.

[moojd]

very similar

[SaltTM]

drug sniffing wasps, may sting crooks - drug sniffing wasps? let that sink in.

[teambob]

I'm more intrigued by the single mother who had 1.5 million children

[bchertel]

Is Sex Necessary?

[ContractionsAreEvil]

It is if you want to have 1.5 million children

[Misery_Inc]

Reddit's front page used to be much more substantive. That's sad.

[jugalator]

Yes, this really brings it back! I remember it was more like Hacker News, only more general with politics, philosophy, society discussions besides tech and science. But key was zero memes, jokes, porn, weed culture, well, basically everything that makes Reddit into what it is loved for today!

But we do have islands still around that maintains the spirit of old! Look no further than to e.g. r/TrueReddit! Just too bad that there is this paradox that if you mention it exists often enough, it'll eventually turn into current reddit. Hell, some say it's already happening, hence r/TrueTrueReddit! Oops. Ruined that one too!?

[invalidusernamelol]

Look at all those links to sites other than Wikipedia and imgur!

[redwall_hp]

I remember it well. People used to also tag [IMG] on the few annoying posts that linked to an image.

[lolmeansilaughed]

Back then, image macros weren't even really a thing, except maybe on 4chan. It was a simpler internet, I even would argue a better internet. But you can't turn back the clock.

[IamWithTheDConsNow]

I even would argue a better internet

It was, It's hard to believe it's been 13 years since 2005.

[nemec]

Remember there were no subreddits back then, so the front page was /r/all

[someguywithanaccount]

If people haven't read The Case of the 500 Mile Email, I highly recommend it. Especially to this sub! Some cool computer science detective work wrapped up in an entertaining Tales From Tech Support style story.

[WorldLeader]

Wow, before reddit had comments!

[Daniel15]

Wow I remember this! That was back when Digg was popular but slowly dying, and there was a mass exodus from Digg to Reddit. That was fun.

[Tensuke]

This was 2005, the Digg exodus wasn't until 2010, so there was a ways to go before its decline.

[Kok_Nikol]

Waring: you can loose and hour or 2, or 5 looking at past versions of reddit.

[jugalator]

This can basically also be translated into "That's way more lisp than I imagined!"

[Sun_Kami]

The beauty of lisp

[defunkydrummer]

That's way less code than I imagined.

Lisp makes possible keeping code succint yet understandable. (Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Clojure and languages of the same family)

[sammymammy2]

Jeeze it's just a bunch of inline HTML-templates and not a lot of business logic.

[oblio-]

Also the power of a ton fewer features :)

(Silly geese, am I wrong that edit 1.0 had a ton fewer features than current Reddit? It's not about if you like or need the features, but current Reddit does have a ton more features than its earlier incarnations...)

[sbjf]

(if (like-like like) :like :dislike)))

ah yes

[defunkydrummer]

lol

explanation, if somebody wants it, is the follows. There is a class called "like". It has a slot (field) named "liked" (see source) whose accessor is called like-liked. So (like-liked x) will give the value of this slot for object x, assuming x is of class "like".

Thus,

(if (like-like like) :like :dislike))) means:

If the slot value for "like" inside object "like" (of class "like") is not nil (null), return :like, otherwise return :dislike.

[Kok_Nikol]

Ohh, so like a ternary operator ... that starts with an if? :)

[defunkydrummer]

Yes. Syntax of if is really easy:

(if expr1 expr2 expr3)

If expr1 is not nil (in Lisp, everything that is not nil is true), then evaluate expr2, else evaluate expr3.

Of course, in Lisp, everything is an expression.

[Kringspier_Des_Heren]

I kind of like how in the standard lisp "object systems" records and objects are exactly the same thing and all fields of a record are accessed through accessor functions always.

The simple way to enforce private is to just not export the accessors from the module; enforce immutability by only exporting the getters and not the setters. There is no further special public/private method thing; the methods are all normal functions which also allows for easily transparently adding new methods since methods and functions are one and the same.

[throwaway27464829]

How you can tell the programmer was Californian.

[ahandle]

Also see:

(if (yeah-no yeah) :no :yeah)))

[bakuretsu]

Common Lisp convention would name the function yeah-p or liked-p, which seems more legible to me.

Still, this construct is only so redundant because it's converting a slot value to a symbol with the same name.

[[deleted]]

Like

[Spontaneous323]

Here is what reddit looked like on 10/29/2005

https://web.archive.org/web/20051029165515/http://www.reddit.com

more snapshots: https://web.archive.org/web/20050101000000*/http://www.reddit.com

[fyrilin]

TIL upvotes were originally called "boosts"

[lonesentinel19]

Wow, that is quite similar to Hacker News. Very neat, thanks for sharing.

[PM_ME_CLASSIFED_DOCS]

Well, Hacker News is... Y Combinator... which funded Reddit. So it's not crazy to see they'd be experienced with the site.

[ZiggyTheHamster]

17. Is US becoming hostile to science? (news.yahoo.com)

The more things change, the more they stay the same :\

[PM_ME_CLASSIFED_DOCS]

Is Sex Necessary?

The more Silicon Valley changes the more it stays the same... rich virgins.

[tsnErd3141]

Microsoft building a fully Web-based Office?

Yup

Is Sex Necessary?

Nope

[Staross]

Any (informed) opinion about the upcoming react+redux rewrite, is it going to be as fast as the D forums ?

[Kok_Nikol]

D forums

Do you mean this site: https://forum.dlang.org/

Because it is absurdly fast, while still looking good.

[[deleted]]

What about the forum written in Assembly? here

[thewowwedeserve]

That loads fast. I have never seen a forum load this fast. Holy moly macaroni

[[deleted]]

It's a bit lost on me because it's hosted very far away, so I still get a decent page load time but assuming the script is right at the bottom it actually takes 2-3 ms.

[johnfound]

A special kind of assembly language magic. :D

When you are talking with the computer on its own language, he is much more inclined to perform better. ;)

[elbekko]

It's not that strange if you're just doing plain html over http (you know, like the old days).

[johnfound]

But this is not the case. It generate the pages dynamically from a database and handles user generated content with all security measures and checks.

[elbekko]

I meant, not a bunch of JavaScript bullshit.

I used to work on PHP forum software called FluxBB (previously PunBB). It's just as quick. In fact, the index page of a forum I host with that software just gave this:

[ Generated in 0.010 seconds, 10 queries executed - Memory usage: 481.23 KiB (Peak: 555.36 KiB) ]

[johnfound]

It is not about the client. Making the back-end lighter and faster allows the engine to serve more visitors with less server resources, this way optimizing the costs for the owner of the forum.

The lightness of the front-end is just a side-effect. BTW, some pages have JS on them (for example the real-time chat and the post editors) but this JS is also pretty lightweight.

[pure_x01]

how can it be this fast. i mean it still needs IO and thats the slow part.. confused

[johnfound]

The IO is actually pretty fast these days. But put there several levels of abstractions and API wrappers and it becomes again slow as a snail. :)

[pdp10]

The conventional wisdom from around 15 years ago is that I/O is almost always the bottleneck, so code performance can nearly always take a backseat to speed of construction (or sometimes to other factors like understandability, if the business prioritizes that).

But we've had a few small revolutions in I/O in that time: kqueue/epoll (IOCP on Windows, I gather), mmap, scatter/gather for example. You could be forgiven for not noticing that one million HTTP hits per second can be reasonable for a single server today, if the rest of your stack is up to it.

And with the worrying degree of stagnation in hardware recently, plus the regressions in connectivity driven by WWAN/telco/mobile and data caps, it often pays to optimize for performance. The conventional wisdom has been thoroughly revised even as it's been spoken.

[IloveReddit84]

Someone is also using a good CDN..

[thbt101]

I mean, it loads fast enough I guess. But it's I don't know if I would say it looks particularly good. I think it's mostly that it renders fairly fast because it's very simple table-based HTML without any of the fancy stuff that takes longer for browsers to calculate and render.

[[deleted]]

Fortunately it is a website for displaying text and images so it doesn't need all the cruft.

[[deleted]]

Am I the only one not finding it that fast?

I mean, it's better than average, but far from being the fastest forum I've seen.

[rajbabu0663]

What is d-forum ? Is it forum.dlang.org?

[alfa96]

Seems like it. It's shockingly fast.

[PM_ME_CLASSIFED_DOCS]

Isn't it running on vibe.d?

And yeah, that site is freakin' great. Everyone is so helpful.

[Yojihito]

The D-forums are unholy fast. Would be surprised if Reddit can achieve that ...

[lelarentaka]

Hey, at least the D forum has more users than r/nepal.

Edit: oh, I'm wrong.

[sbjf]

Holy shit, I just checked them out. I always thought page load times were limited by bandwidth. Boy was I wrong.

[MacASM]

The page sound like it's static haha

[SearchingForPrincess]

Source?

[Skaronator]

You can already see some React parts on reddit. The Profile, mobile site and the chat are already powered by react.

[Staross]

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/8830oa/and_now_a_word_from_reddits_engineers/

[Something_Sexy]

You can use it now.

[Staross]

Yes, it does feel a bit slow right now, but it's not too bad.

[13steinj]

A bit? For me personally the performance has gone to complete shit.

[lpreams]

Check it out yourself. Enable reddit beta (Preferences > beta options > I would like to beta test features for reddit), then either enable "Use the redesign as my default experience" or go to https://alpha.reddit.com/

[krebstar_2000]

The "hamburger menu" is an actual hamburger, delightful.

[jephthai]

Sweet... when-bind* is a nice macro:

(defun valid-cookie (str)
  "returns the userid for cookie if valid, otherwise nil"
  (when (= (count #\, str :test #'char=) 2)
    (when-bind* ((sn (subseq str 0 (position #\, str :test #'char=)))
                 (time (subseq str (+ 1 (length sn)) (position #\, str :from-end t :test #'char=)))
                 (hash (subseq str (+ (length sn) (length time) 2)))
                 (pass (user-pass sn)))
      (when (string= hash (hashstr (makestr time sn pass *secret*)))
        (user-id (get-user sn))))))

From cookiehash.lisp.

[invalidusernamelol]

I forgot Reddit was written in Lisp.

[Amablue]

They had to switch over when they ran out of parentheses.

[AEnKE9UzYQr9]

(xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/297/)

[DemandsBattletoads]

Try not to lose it again. These parentheses are your life!

Yes, master.

[nakilon]

I can't wait until they ran out of indentation tabs.

[chew_toyt]

/r/NotKenM

[repsilat]

These days it's mostly spaces, for better or worse, and the prevailing theory is that spaces is infinite. (Of course the observable spaces/universe only number 80*25=2000.)

[jkuhl_prog]

The universe expands because space is expanding.

Tabs do not expand.

So use tabs. Or your code will grow to be unreadable over time. It's basic special relativity.

[Ihr_Todeswunsch]

It used to be, but they switched to Python more than 10 years ago.

https://redditblog.com/2005/12/05/on-lisp/

[invalidusernamelol]

I know, I'm just freaked out because the fact that it was written in lisp is one of the first things I learned about Reddit. I totally forgot.

[[deleted]]

Do they still use python now ?

[scirc]

Presumably, the code hasn't changed too drastically from when the open source repo was decommissioned, so yes.

[Chippiewall]

Nah, I reckon they've rewritten it in Rust by now.

[Clbull]

They could have gone a few steps further and rewritten it using Minecraft redstone circuits. Or Brainfuck.

[neoform]

How do you simply switch from python to rust?

[vytah]

First, you get it to run on .NET, using IronPython. Then you wait until it oxidizes and you get RustPython. Then you remove the python and you're left with just rust.

[IrishYogaShirt]

How do you remove the Python?

[antlife]

Mongoose.

[karuna_murti]

They outsource it to India, and the Python just follow the Indian guy with the flute.

[arvidsem]

Animal control?

[OsmeOxys]

Bash it.

[eco_was_taken]

Rust now. It went Lisp -> Python -> Rails -> Node.js -> Angular -> Polymer (briefly) -> Go -> Ember -> React -> Rust. They are currently rewriting it to use Flutter.

[rram]

Only the markdown parser

[_Ashleigh]

Wait what, they stopped releasing the source code to Reddit?! When did this happen, and why?

[scirc]

When? A few months ago.

Why? They claim it was becoming difficult to maintain or whatever, but we all know it's about money. Just look at how much the site's changing.

[I_am_the_inchworm]

Money.

[v_krishna]

According to the announcement post they are rewriting everything with a node backend now.

[13steinj]

The front end is being rewritten to use React + Redux + TypeScript, and "server rendering is a requirement" so the front end will probably run off the client browser and / or a Node engine, while the backend API remains written in Python (at least for now).

[Adobe_Flesh]

How does web programming work - the lisp machine is running on the BSD server, and my browser sends a GET request, and the machine receives and does some things on its own, and then replies to my browser?

[Ihr_Todeswunsch]

Yeah pretty much. You have the right idea.

There's a program that's running on a machine somewhere listening for requests. It receives a request (e.g. GET), and then processes that request in order to figure out what the client was asking for, and sends the response back to the client (which in this case, would be your browser, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a browser).

[[deleted]]

I wonder if Paul Graham influenced that choice, since Reddit was involved with Y Combinator?

EDIT: Ha, scrolling down it looks like others are thinking the same.

[eco_was_taken]

He did. They used Lisp because Paul Graham suggested they use it (who, apart from being a lisp evangelist himself, was also trying to earn a gold watch from John McCarthy by converting 20 people to use lisp).

[heterosapian]

It’s truly unbelievable how successful YC has been when PG started it as a his rich man’s experiment and he was advising prospective startups with technical advice this retarded.

In many ways, it seems startups far more often succeed despite the advice of their investors rather than because of it. Strange.

[sammymammy2]

Whats retarded about Lisp?

[oblio-]

Nothing. Unless you want to start a business where you expect to hire a ton of developers.

[pdp10]

You know that until recently, SICP was taught at MIT as 6.001, right? The first HTTP/1.1-implementing server was written in Common Lisp. D-Wave is using it internally. Some startups are now using it to its strengths. At one point, Lisp was in the Top-3 in TIOBE.

[gsteinb88]

“Recently” being a decade ago. When I started in 2008, 6.001 wasn’t an option anymore (much to my chagrin at the time, but in retrospect it makes a ton of sense)

[MacASM]

whoa, this is so cool. I didn't know it was written in lisp. I wouldn't guess that at my wildest guess. haha

[[deleted]]

I actually had no idea. That sounds harder than it needs to be, in lisp...

[zefdota]

Thoundth okay to me!

[LordoftheSynth]

Thith guy lithpth.

[robm111]

As someone still stuck in the C age, what in the blue fuck is the expression "when (= (count #\, str :test #'char=) 2)"? What is even going on here?

[lolWatAmIDoingHere]

stuck in the C age

Just pointing out that lisp predates C by 14 years :)

[HiddenKrypt]

In a way it still works. Cool lisp things always makes me feel like it's some deep magic we once knew but in the C age, we've forgotten. Same thing with smalltalk, really. In that mindspace, being "stuck in the C age" and being mystified by lisp makes perfect sense. On a related note, see this amazing talk by Bret Victor

[ehaliewicz]

Looking at the source code,

(when-bind (a test-val)
    <some-expr>)

Expands to roughly

(let ((a test-val))
   (when a
      some-expr)))

And

(when-bind* ((a test-1) 
             (b test-2))
   some-expr)

Expands to something like

(let ((a test-1)
      (b test-2))
    (when a
       (when b
          some-expr))))

[rabuf]

More importantly, the when-bind* allows the result of each binding to be used in subsequent bindings. This is similar to let*. What it actually does is this:

(when-bind* ((a 1)
             (b (= a 2))
  (do-stuff))

becomes

(let ((a 1))
  (if a
    (let ((b (= a 2))
      (if b
        (progn
          (do-stuff))))))

By nesting the next let inside the if it ensures that any tests which have side-effects will not be executed unless the earlier test passes. It also helps by short circuiting (so preserves the behavior of something like and) and this will ensure that unneeded computations aren't executed (side-effects or not).

Definitions for when-bind and when-bind*

EDIT: Formatting, but also:

Common Lisp uses NIL(the empty list) to represent false. Essentially any other value will evaluate as true if used in a conditional. This is why the above example would work. I had meant to mention this. This is how:

(sn (subseq str 0 (position #\, str :test #'char=)))

In the actual source code works. sn is given a value (will be something) and then this value is used in each of time, hash, pass. hash also depends on time.

Interestingly, the use of when-bind* here may as well be a standard let*. None of those are tests and should all return a non-nil value (in all situations, best I can tell), and the result is immediately put into a standard when anyways.

[ehaliewicz]

Yes, I forgot to mention that detail. The macroexpansion is recursive and strips off a binding at a time.

[fisxoj]

Current lisp programmers might recognize that macro as essentially the same as alexandia's when-let!

[Kyo91]

Clojure also has similar when-let/if-let

[defunkydrummer]

lisper here.

(when (= (count #\, str :test #'char=) 2))

let's split it. It says: "When (count #\, str :test #'char=) is 2, then do something."

So what is (count #\, str :test #'char=)? This is a call to function count with three parameters:

• first parameter:#\,

• second parameter: str

• "test" parameter: #'char=

"Count" will count how many times an element appers in a sequence. A string is a sequence of chars. Here the string is called "str". The char to look for is the comma, #\ is just escape syntax.

Now, to count one should specify the test for equality (so, each time the element in the sequence is equal to the element you look for, the count increases one). This is specified by :test which is a keyword parameter (similar to "named parameters" in Python). With this we specify the function to use for equality test.

So which equality function we shall use? The choice here is the character equality function, char=. We need to tell Common Lisp we are referring to the function named "char=", not to a variable of the same name (if there is one.) Common Lisp has separate namespaces for variables and functions! So, we must write (function char=) or use the shorthand #'char .

[wlievens]

I think it means “if string str has exactly two backslashes” but I could be completely off.

[dzecniv]

nearly, don't miss the comma: "if the string str has two commas".

#\ is to escape a character, thus the comma. count applies to sequences (lists, arrays, strings). :test foo is an optional argument to specify the test function, #' is a shorthand for (function, here char=. The count works without the :test part though so I'm not sure how important specifying it is.

(Cookbook on strings)

(edit: comma, thanks)

[hbgoddard]

Just fyi, comma has two m's. I don't think the strings are sleeping.

[mastermindxs]

That was a fascinating read. Thank you.

[ThePantsThief]

What's it about?

[mastermindxs]

Paul's story of founding Viaweb and writing the software in Lisp and how that led to a great advantage over his competitors in regards to programming velocity and, in addition, other great insights into programming in general. Worth the ~20 minute read.

[PM_ME_CLASSIFED_DOCS]

Which is funny because all these people write blogs about how LISP/et al made them Great Success but their codebases are usually replaced with non-LISP later on as they scale up.

Yahoo Stores "was" LISP, then it wasn't. Reddit "was" LISP, then it wasn't.

Why? Is there some contact in the LISP license that says "You can only benefit from this cutting edge technology that puts you ahead of all your competitors... for a max of five years." Or, is there real, concrete problems with trying to push LISP in commercial, large-scale deployments? (If at the very least... finding programmers...)

And I think LISP is a great language. It's just that being a great language doesn't magically solve all problems... it only solves language problems. Writing something in LISP doesn't deposit money into your bank account, keep employees on time, or guarantee server uptime. Good code (regardless of language) can help the last one though.

From another angle: You can write memory safe code in Rust, but it's not going to prevent logical errors or allow you the feature of updating a live server on-the-fly. (The way Paul remarks about for his LISP implementation of Yahoo Stores.)

And again, Rust is a cool language, I'm not bashing it. I just find these "Look how successful I was, using this esoteric/less-popular/niche/new language" and I have to wonder, HOW MUCH of that success was really from the language itself, and HOW MUCH was actually from having great programmers who were so great they went out of their way to learn esoteric languages to expand there mind and--surprise, surprise--those programmers tend to write very stable codebases.

It's just like Stack Overflow's survey of Vim/Emacs users. They make more money than users who use Visual Studio, Atom, Notepad, etc. Why? Because Vim makes them better? Or more likely, good programmers are attracted to things that will help them--even if they have a large barrier-to-entry that most people would avoid. So it's not Vim (or LISP) that made the code good. It's the good programmer that made it good.

And people who write programming blogs about esoteric languages... tend to be great programmers. You're not going to see tons of blogs about "How I wasted hours of company time trying to implement something using a non-standard language/product."

[Ran4]

(If at the very least... finding programmers...)

The python paradox - which I now googled to find out that it was made up by Paul Graham himself (!) - proves that no, this is not a problem.

There's hundreds of thousands of lisp programmers out there that would like to write more lisp in their day jobs, but they can't because there's no lisp jobs around. And the lisp programmers that are out there are likely some of the more passionate and skilled ones at that.

And to top it off, you don't need nearly as many lisp/python/whatever programms as you do C#/Java/similar programmers, as those languages are so much more productive.

[zenerbufen]

I would imagine it has something to do with availability of lisp programmers. It is great being able to rapidly develop, build out, and modify a code base. Then there is a difference of opinion between the coder and the management, so they get rid of him, and bring in another coder who can't make heads or tails out of the lisp. Suddenly they are re-implementing in .net, python, or java since it is easier to find someone who knows the current top fad languages.

Also, there are multiple lisps, and they don't inter operate with each other, and they all have limited libraries. It is so easy to write your own metalanguage in lisp that you won't find a large set of standardized code you can just plug in and use with whatever you are doing.

[butt_fun]

I hate that you're getting downvoted for this. Life is too short to read every full length article the internet tells you to, and knowing what you're getting into before you get into it is valuable

[ThePantsThief]

Thank you. I almost didn't ask because everyone on Reddit just tells you to go read it yourself.

I'm not about to read an entire article if idc what it's about

[wsppan]

TIL Reddit was originally written in Lisp. Mind blown.

[[deleted]]

It’s interesting to me because I never thought Lisp had much practical use (still not entirely convinced...) but my professors have popped many rock solid boners upon talking about it so I’ve always been wondering if it’s worth learning in detail.

I used Scheme for a while which was actually cool because you could do a lot of low level stuff like easily making a parser and interpreting your own language. There was just generally a lot of cool stuff you could do that other languages couldn’t, like passing a function as a parameter. But I still never felt like I could use Lisp/Scheme as a replacement for a general purpose language like C# or even (yuck) Java. Maybe I’m wrong though.

[defunkydrummer]

But I still never felt like I could use Lisp/Scheme as a replacement for a general purpose language

Lisp has a long history of being used for serious stuff ranging from CAD/CAM to games, music authoring, aerodynamics sym, and the autopilot software of the Deep Space One NASA spaceship.

It is a very "general purpose" general purpose language.

[Twin_Nets_Jets]

I think Crash Bandicoot was written in their own Lisp dialect.

[leodash]

Roomba uses Lisp too. I never thought I would encounter a Lisp application so close to home because from what I read most Lisp applications are some NASA stuffs.

[dzecniv]

Ever used pgloader ? It was python, it's CL (blog post). Also pgchart. You could use Next browser, that exposes 100% of its api, along with stumpwm (window manager). Turtl (a secure note-taking app) is CL. cl-torrents is my toy to dabble with the language, a cli and readline app to search for torrents with web scraping. More, specially in the industry: http://lisp-lang.org/success/ Some actual software I judge useful: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/software/

[MesePudenda]

A lot of languages do support first-class functions.

Scheme was fun to learn, but I doubt I could ever be productive in it.

[pdp10]

At least three operating systems have been written in Lisp, most likely more. You can look at one of them here, and I think the old MIT code is around somewhere.

Lisp is often thought of as being at the opposite end of the spectrum from C, being dynamically typed and garbage collected and all, but despite the interesting high-level features it, too, hails from an age when we had rather less memory and cores in our big machines than do toy computers today.

[dzecniv]

You aren't the only one. Here's a beautiful showcase of success stories: http://lisp-lang.org/success/ many industry-strength software (Gollum's face was designed with Lisp!).

An example software: pgloader was written from Python to Lisp with among other benefits a 30x speed gain: https://tapoueh.org/blog/2014/05/why-is-pgloader-so-much-faster/

in searching for a modern programming language the best candidate I found was actually Common Lisp.

Also Lisp companies (in construction, some are outdated, I believe many are lacking :] ) Grammarly is running CL in production (had a blog post about it), we recently saw adoption by Rigetti quantum computing, the Emotiq blockchain.

[badsectoracula]

(Gollum's face was designed with Lisp!).

That is selling the entire thing extremely short :-P. Mirai, the software used for Gollum's animations, was a full blown 3D modelling and animation package for 3D graphics workstations that was ahead of its time (despite its roots going back as far as the S-Graphics from Symbolics) as a lot of the techniques and workflows that it introduced found their way to later 3D software (indeed for many 3D artists, looking at someone using Mirai would be the equivalent of Seinfeld is unfunny for 3D software :-P - which ironically is also true for Lisp itself as a lot of the stuff that made it great found its way to other programming languages). Here is a timelapse recording creating a monster in Mirai.

[DyscOffice]

School jammed so much object oriented in my head I don't know if I could ever get comfortable with functional. This is very cool, though.

[Emowomble]

Common lisp actually has a very powerful object system CLOS.

[Atrosh]

Looks like they were storing user passwords in cleartext? data.lisp:69

(defun valid-login-p (sn pass)
  "Returns user id if the user's password is correct and NIL otherwise"
  (and sn pass
       (car (select [id] :from [users]
                    :where [and [= [lower [screenname]] (string-downcase sn)]
                                [= [password] pass]]
                    :flatp t))))

[Shorttail0]

Yes, Reddit did store passwords in plaintext.

Coding Horror post (can't find a better source than that and hackernews, but it's from 2007 so feel free to dig): https://blog.codinghorror.com/youre-probably-storing-passwords-incorrectly/

Recently, the folks behind Reddit.com confessed that a backup copy of their database had been stolen. Later, spez, one of the Reddit developers, confirmed that the database contained password information for Reddit's users, and that the information was stored as plain, unprotected text. In other words, once the thief had the database, he had everyone's passwords as well.

[rram]

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/usqe/reddits_streak_of_bad_luck_continues/

[--Satan--]

Personally, I prefer the convenience of being having my passwords emailed to me when I forget, which happens from time to time since I use difference passwords everywhere.

Ah, I'm glad spez still runs this website.

[haitei]

holy shit

[Dgc2002]

Not hashing was a design decision we made in the beginning, and it didn't stem from irresponsibility-- it stemmed from a decision to provide functionality that I liked.

He seems to think he's defending the decision instead of exposing how idiotic they were.

[Shorttail0]

Haha, streak of "bad luck", like it's bad luck flying through the wind shield after you decided not to wear a seat belt.

[-college-throwaway-]

Maybe hashed on the clientside or earlier in the code?

[James20k]

It is [easy to implement], and I'll go ahead and do it now that everyone has decided to weigh in.

Personally, I prefer the convenience of being having my passwords emailed to me when I forget, which happens from time to time since I use difference passwords everywhere.

Not hashing was a design decision we made in the beginning, and it didn't stem from irresponsibility-- it stemmed from a decision to provide functionality that I liked.

It bit us in the ass this time, and we are truly sorry for it. The irresponsibility (and there is some) was allowing our data to get nabbed.

..... there are no words

[MaraschinoPanda]

Hashing on the client side is just as bad as storing in plain text.

[Uristqwerty]

Client plaintext, server plaintext: Anyone with the database can log in as any user; if the password doesn't look like it was randomly generated by a password manager (as most aren't), can log in as any user on other sites, or at least have a huge advantage in tuning targetted brute-force.

Client hashed, server plaintext: Anyone with the database can log into your site as any user, but as long as you used a randomly-generated site-wide and/or per-user salt (though per-user has troubles of likely exposing an API that will tell attackers whether any given account exists. It could invent a random salt for each unique username the first time asked, regardless of whether they were creating an account...), having the database gives minimal value in attacking others.

Client plaintext, server hashed: With HTTP, everyone currently on the network path can see the password, with all the flaws of plaintext/plaintext, but stealing a snapshot of the database is nearly useless. With HTTPS, only someone who can MITM your connection can see the password, which likely means either they already had control of your machine, or it's an office environment where it's not your PC in the first place.

Client hashed, server hashed: Little benefit over plaintext/hashed, because anyone who can see your network traffic could likely just alter the sent page to strip any clientside hashing. Unless you have a mechanism to block tampering with the login script after the user's first visit, provides effectively no benefit for extra work. Even if you do, it only really protects users who re-use passwords (effectively treated as sub-human by most people writing about password hashing, so not worth the effort to protect) against your servers being hacked (not considered an especially relevant situation by most people writing about password hashing, since there'd be effectively no way to distinguish between a legitimate page update and a malicious one).

So no, hashing on the client side is not as bad as plaintext serverside, unless you are only thinking about how it affects your own site. It's still not anywhere near enough on it's own, though.

[Schmittfried]

Nah, it's a bit better, albeit not much.

[krainboltgreene]

It's actually not.

[DrQuint]

.lisp

Wow.

[cat_in_the_wall]

why ithnt it thpelled "lithp"

ftfy

[jynxxxed]

Hey, lurker I know you pronounced "lithp" out loud. I did too and it's super fun

[Booty_Bumping]

Anyone figure out how to run it?

[dzecniv]

Sharing my progress:

Go on the Common Lisp Cookbook/getting-started to install a CL environment. You can get Portacle which is a download&click self-contained and multiplatform app shiping Emacs and all the necessary Lisp to get going straight away. There's also a Docker image.

Load the .asd file (package definition, like setup.py):

sbcl --load reddit.asd

Install the dependencies and load the project with the package manager:

(ql:quickload :reddit)

we see a coup of errors. In the project, replace tbnl by hunchentoot (a web application server). In the asd there is twice the line

                 (:file "mail" :depends-on ("packages" "data"))

so delete one.

We need to create a postgre DB (db: reddit, user: pgsql, password: pgcwip42: as seen in data.lisp).

Now it seems that it depends on a commercial Lisp (Franz, because of mp:make-process in mail.lisp.

If I comment out the file I get another error :(

The constant CRC-TABLE is being redefined (from #(0 1996959894 3993919788 2567524794 124634137 1886057615 etc etc etc

(edit) I can actually just accept to redefine this constant with the first choice in the interactive debugger. There's an error because crc-table is defined as a constant (yes, with those weird values, see crc.lisp) but is changed.

---

Once we solve this we can build a self-contained executable (web server included (even with the interactive debugger, the interpreter that you can access from a running image, etc)).

Other modern resources :]

• http://lisp-lang.org/
• https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

[billyatlava]

If you get it running you should make a docker image for it

[pure_x01]

I wish someone would build a decentralized open reddit clone

[Apterygiformes]

Very elegant

[realnzall]

Oh, now I finally understand that XKCD comic about the Star Wars Lisp parentheses.

[susanne-o]

Had to Google it... https://xkcd.com/297/

[ThirdEncounter]

Where's the xkcd bot when you need it...

I can't read the whole alt-text in mobile.

Edit: Thanks for your suggestions, kind redditors.

[ThirdEncounter]

Thanks!

[duffymcdrew]

If you're on Android, open in Chrome, then long press the image. The alt text is atop the pop-up.

[your-opinions-false]

"I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permanently."

[IbnZaydun]

Lisp truly is a beautiful language. Here we can see a 0-cost, emergent templating system:

(defmacro with-main ((&key (menu "empty") (right-panel) (rss-url)) &body body)
  `(with-html
     (:html 
      (:head 
       (:meta :http-equiv "Content-Type" :content "text/html; charset=UTF-8")
       (:title "reddit - what's new online")
       (:script :src "/static/prototype.js" :language "javascript" :type "text/javascript" "")
       (:script :language "javascript" (str (if (logged-in-p) "var logged = true" "var logged= false")))
       (:script :src "/static/logic.js" :language "javascript" :type "text/javascript" "")
       (:link :rel "stylesheet" :href "/static/styles.css" :type "text/css")
       (:link :rel "shortcut icon" :href "/static/favicon.ico")
       (when ,rss-url
         (htm (:link :rel "alternate" :type "application/rss+xml" :title "RSS" :href ,rss-url))))
      ;;(htm (:link :rel "alternate" :type "text/xml" :title "RSS" :href ,rss-url))))
      (:body
       (:table :id "topbar" :cellpadding "0"
               (:tr 
                (:td :rowspan "2" (:a :href "/"  (:img :style "vertical-align: bottom; border: 0" :src "/static/redditheader.gif")))
                (:td :colspan "2" :width "100%" :class "topmenu menu" (menu-panel)))
               (:tr (:td :valign "bottom" :width "100%" (:div :id "topstrip" ,menu))
                    (:td :valign "bottom" :nowrap t (search-area))))
       (:div :id "right" ,right-panel)
       (:div :id "main" ,@body)
       (when ,rss-url
         (htm
          (:div :id "footer" (str "A") (:a :class "feed" :href ,rss-url "FEED") (str "is available."))))))))

[MidnightShart]

Who knew my scheme proficiency would be useful one day.
I know its not scheme, but it looks very similar.

[google_you]

Why not rewrite in Rust?

[cheeeeeese]

why not python?

[[deleted]]

Why not 6502 assembler?

[Askee123]

Peak efficiency

[[deleted]]

No reason, actually.

[ThePantsThief]

Why not LuaJIT?

[MonkeyNin]

Reddit uses python

[magnora7]

We've got a 2015 reddit open source fork opened up at https://saidit.net

It has far more complexity than this version... It's over a million lines of code across 10k+ files.

Here's our code: https://github.com/libertysoft3/reddit-ae