Lisp in the Cloud and
The Next Lisp Machine Will Be
Everywhere
Mike Travers
Github: mtravers
Lisp BOF, 31 March 2012
Bifurcated Lightning Talk
Small hacks that
make Lisp web
apps practical
Grand vision of what
computing should be
Instant Lisp Web Servers
EC2
Heroku (Cedar Stack)
Common Lisp Buildpack
Clozure CL
QuickLisp Portable
AllegroServe
WuWei
Application!
Hunchentoot
SBCL Already forked on Github!
Heroku CL Buildpack
1) Get Heroku and Github accounts.
2) Fork mtravers/heroku-cl-example 3)
4) [add your stuff]
5) git push heroku
6) Voila, a Lisp-based website!
heroku create -s cedar --buildpack http://github.com/mtravers/heroku-buildpack-cl.git
Infrastructure TBD
• Adding in a persistence layer
Heroku provides Postgres, hooking up
CLSQL
• Security, Performance, Scaling
• Debugging tools
(already an EVAL server)
• Building a big application
• Overtaking Rails
WuWei – Web toolkit
• Philosophy: toolkit not platform
• Continuation-based AJAX user interfaces
• Server-side high-level DOM operations (update elements, visual effects, drag and drop)
• High-level interfaces to in-place editing and autocomplete widgets
• Login and session management
• OAuth2 support (coming soon)
• Runs in multiple Common Lisp implementations
• Freely available under MIT Open Source License
• In use: http://biocyc.org (SRI)
• http://wuwei.name or GitHub mtravers/wuwei
WuWei and ARC Challenge
• Paul Graham’s test for a web language (2008)http://www.paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html
• Pretty concise and you don’t have to invent a new language for it.
(wu-publish "/said"
((:form :action
(wu-continuation (:args (foo))
((:a href (wu-continuation () (:princ foo)))
"Click me")))
((:input :name "foo"))
((:input :type :submit))))
So What?
• Why is Lisp interesting in today’s world?
• We know it’s not just another language,
but what exactly does it offer?
Habitable Software
• Richard Gabriel: software where “developers … place their hands on any item without having to think deeply about where it is.”
• Past Lisp Systems: – REPLs
– LispM / Dynamic Windows / CLIM
• Some of Mm Efforts – Skij (REPL in Java, 1997)
– Children’s Visual Programming / Behave / Scratch
– BioBike: through-the-web symbolic biocomputing
• But today’s computational world is different: – Web, Mobile Devices
– Distributed Systems, Web Services
– Big Data
– Social user experience
– Social coding
Next Grand Vision
• What we should be building: – All the interactive computational power of a Lisp
Machine
– in the world of the Web, Distributed Services, Big Data, Social Computing, etc.
• Occupy Computation! – Make computational worlds visible, controllable,
buildable, and habitable by the people who need to interact with them.
– The computational world is increasingly indistinguishable from the real world, so this is a political imperative
Conclusion
• Lisp lowers barriers,
• The Internet lowers barriers,
• Heroku lowers barriers,
• Let’s keep doing more of
that.