Jonathan Simon's Blog

Paul Graham and Java?

Is Paul Graham, a very open and strong opponent of Java, using it himself? Well, not exactly.

But Paul Graham's former company ViaWeb that was sold to Yahoo is. The last issue of Swing Sightings points to the Java based Yahoo site builder application for small business.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't make a big deal out of something like this. But a decent amount of effort was spent in Hackers and Painters slamming Java and explaining why the entire success of ViaWeb was really because of Lisp. So, you have to at least appreciate the irony in that the remnants of the company he used as an example of why not to use Java -- are now using Java themselves.

Comments

• Uh, I haven't read Graham in a while, but I'm pretty sure he claimed the reason the site was rewritten was the new developers maintaining the site aren't able to handle a "language for smart people", or something to that effect. Which is the whole problem with LISP, hackers may like it, but it doesn't scale to real world environments.

  Posted by: paulcaplan on November 29, 2004 at 01:49 PM

• "but it doesn't scale to real world environments"

  I guess it must just be a research language or something then? ViaWeb had tens of thousands of customers. What constitues a real world environment?

  I mean.. why the hell would anyone think of developing the Los Angeles traffic management system in Lisp if it doesn't scale to real world environments?

  The original team of developers all walked away with large wads of cash. Yahoo couldn't find enough skilled Lisp developers, so they re-wrote it in Java.
  

  Posted by: malby on November 29, 2004 at 06:06 PM

• 'Not being able to find developers' isn't a valid excuse. Companies the size of Yahoo should create their own developers.

  Contrast with Ericson and 'their' functional language: Erlang

  Not training up your own people is practically criminal negligence, could Yahoo have opened themselves up to a minority shareholders class action???

  Posted by: rickcarson on November 29, 2004 at 06:35 PM

• It wasn't as glamorous as you people make it out to be. I've done work for both viaweb and yahoo on this product. While viaweb was really ahead of it's time it didn't age very well. What had it's roots as a school project ended up being a variety of bolted on featuers. It was built on a LISP framework with a properitery scripting language "rhtml" to build templates. All of it was gleefully undocumented and unwieldy. Once yahoo picked it up it wouldn't run a day without crashing becuase it had serious scalability problems.

  Posted by: viawebtech on November 30, 2004 at 10:13 AM

• Yahoo does not use Java for 'Yahoo store' a successor of ViaWeb. They reimplementd product in C and Perl in a worst possible way - to have c functions similar to original lisp API.
  and they use Perl for GUI

  I know a guy who works for Yahoo store.

  Posted by: zibuk on November 30, 2004 at 01:42 PM

• I got an email from Paul Graham asking me to post his comments. Here they are.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

  
  As far as I know, Site Builder is for general business web sites
  (e.g. chiropractors), not e-commerce specifically. I'm fairly sure
  it was not even written by the same group that took over our code.
  Not that it would be accurate to describe even them as the "remnants"
  of Viaweb. There are no Viaweb engineers still working for Yahoo
  and there haven't been for about 3 years.

  So the most you can truthfully say is that the company that bought
  us now, 6 years later, offers another product with some overlap in
  features that is written in Java.

  As for Mr. Viawebtech, you certainly didn't work for Viaweb "on
  this product." We used no outside developers. It didn't start
  as a school project. It's Rtml, not Rhtml. And it's total crap
  to say it wouldn't run a day without crashing after Yahoo bought
  us. I went with the code to Yahoo and was in charge of it for
  the first year, and nothing was any different.

  -- Paul Graham
  

  Posted by: jonathansimon on November 30, 2004 at 05:51 PM

• Never said I was a developer, I was providing tech support for your product through the vendor you hired to do so. As for the claim about scalability. I remember with fondness the days where the calls for support change from "How do I do this?" into "Why can I not access my site?". Sorry about confusing rtml with rhtml it's been a long time....

  Posted by: viawebtech on December 03, 2004 at 05:12 AM

• we all know that all companies of modest size and up are capable of making all kinds of nonsensical business decisions. we can't possibly try to pin those decisions on the developers, who most of the time have little say and little sway into that decision-making. i know nothing about yahoo but i would guess that they're no different from other large corporations. they probably have managers who are not developers at heart making the final decisions.

  i recall reading this news about yahoo sitebuilder on swing sightings. my ears did "perk up," so to speak. so actually i'm glad to see that someone picked up on it and blogged it. but there's no doubt in my mind that it does not affect the arguments for lisp brought forth in the essay(s) in hackers and painters, which i most enjoyed reading. i have always wanted the opportunity to say to paul graham "thanks for writing this totally enjoyable, totally honest, totally cool book." so, there it is.

  Posted by: eitan on December 03, 2004 at 07:28 AM

• It's always fun to post something like this because it gets people thinking of the big picture. We spend alot of time figuring out how to use or manipulate some small piece of Java -- the micro world, and I think we don't generally cover the Macro world well enough at java.net -- whether or not we should be using Java for what we are programming.

  I think hackers and painters is an excellent book, and I really enjoyed Paul Grahams discussions about Lisp. Not necessarily because I agreed, but because it made me think. My personal take is that Lisp and Java each have their place. I can think of scenarios where each one would be better than the other.

  You guys here know me fairly well now and you know I'm very often critical of Java because I see the power in it and I want to see that power realized. But it's important to make a distinction between what is possible and what simply isnt going to happen.

  For example, I do alot of audio development. I think its time to throw in the towel for Java audio. There hasnt been a Java sound team for months and the implementation, to be very kind, is extremely lacking.

  So what I'll take away from this is -- yes Java has some issues, no I dont think we're all a bunch of sissies for using it, and yes its not right for everything. So just use Java for what its good for.

  Posted by: jonathansimon on December 03, 2004 at 10:25 AM

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