Reddit Blog

>The point is, a language’s popularity should not determine its usefulness. [...] More importantly, we need to stop treating them as fads, religions, or special memberships to the cool kids clubs.

I think a lot of debate about "popularity" boils down to 2 different meanings of "popular".

The folks defending a language that's losing "popularity" are thinking of "popular" like a high-school prom queen type of popularity. E.g. Maybe the language is no longer the prettiest girl at the dance but I don't care and nothing you can say will change my mind!

But as I tried to explain in my previous message about ColdFusion popularity[1], others are using the word "popular" as an imprecise proxy for up-to-date-language-I-can-easily-get-a-job-in. E.g. Is this language widely used enough where I can tap a vast community's help to solve problems? In this 2nd meaning, "popularity" does indeed determine its usefulness.

An example is Python being "more popular" than Lisp. Again, don't think of "prom queen popular" to trigger defensive essays; instead think of "ecosystem popular". Here's an excerpt[2] from Steve Huffman about migrating Reddit from Lisp to Python:

>If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we’re building a site largely by standing on…

Many of the benefits of Lisps that you talk about here seem to be refuted by writeups I've read where large groups switched from a Lisp to something else...often because it was hard to work with, slower to write and harder to maintain.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

Over at reddit.com, we rewrote the site from Lisp to Python in the past week. It was pretty much done in one weekend. (Disclosure: We used my web.py library.) The others knew Lisp (they wrote their whole site in it) and they knew Python (they rewrote their whole site in it) and yet they decided liked Python better for this project. The Python version had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain.

http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html

If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand.

...

We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear.

...

The entire task took less than a week, with 80% of the code written in a single weekend.

I know of several other large corporate projects over the years that made similar switches for…

> Similarly perilous is the fact that code changes very quickly. Android development practices, as an example, have changed drastically over the last few years, but the popular Stack Overflow solutions are still from 2013, meaning that budding developers might be learning through outdated solutions.

I'm a community-elected moderator on Stack Overflow, and I think this is the biggest problem - outdated answers. Stack Overflow was founded in 2008, now about 8 years ago. New and better answers that may be much better than sloppy 8 year old answer can take years to rise up to compete with the ranking of those answers, as the the default sorting mechanism is by net up/down votes.

I'd like that addressed, in a way that minimizes disruption. Accepted answers should be allowed to float in the rankings instead of being pinned at the top after a number of years. And there should be an optional "hotness" sort that primarily considers recent votes (say in the past year).

Until they do address it, the new, great answers will remain buried.

Others like to suggest Reddit's sorting method ( https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/ ), but that doesn't consider recency (my main concern) - and makes sense for them because voting is frozen after a period of time, whereas we can still vote on 8 year old questions on Stack Overflow - so revenge-downvoting (which, while verboten, can slip through the cracks) would have an outsized effect.

I don't see this as hacker-worthy -- it's mostly subreddit drama and reddit has banned people and subreddits which caused them bad PR before.

My opinion aside, here's the rough timeline of the events based on reddit posts:

* the reddit blog post [1]; it has a timestamp of 2014/09/07 00:39 UTC.

* which claims "approximately the same time, activity in that subreddit starting violating other rules we have which do trigger a ban";

* the actual time of the subreddit ban (based on [2], it happened more than 5 hours ago, so before 2014/09/07 02:16 UTC

* the explanation of the bans [3], which (based on the time stamp) was posted 15 minutes ago, so around 2014/09/07 07:49 UTC.

and here's the paragraph explaining the bans, also from [3]:

> It became obvious that we were either going to have to watch these subreddits constantly, or shut them down. We chose the latter. It's obviously not going to solve the problem entirely, but it will at least mitigate the constant issues we were facing. This was an extreme circumstance, and we used the best judgement we could in response.

The lesson here is probably "declaring support for specific subreddits while imposing new rules on them will never work, as the contributors to those subreddits will inevitably rebel".

[1]: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-for-his-own.html?m=1

[2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2foqu1/reddit_bans_all_fappening_related_subreddits/

[3]:…

And they do this while putting out a doublespeak public statement saying they don't do things like banning subreddits (but reserve the right to), and were not legally required to in this case.

Read it here: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-for-his-own.html

Here's the comments from their blog post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_responsible_for_his_own_soul/

The admins are getting called out in nearly every top-level comment for folding to media attention and celebrity lawyers, when other objectively worse subreddits are actually granted the "hands-off" approach the site claims to use. Presumably because the victims can't afford legal teams or make headlines like celebrities can when their privacy is violated.

The leaks were despicable and I understand any business taking steps to avoid involvement in their distribution, but you can't expect a user-base like reddits to tolerate the administration saying one thing and doing the exact opposite in certain cases where there's bad press involved.

Edit: Here's a follow-up post from the sysadmin alienth in response to the backlash from their decision: http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_to_talk/

It could be anything in the top 20, really [0]. The problem is that devs have an impulse to do something experimental and cool, since they have to work with workhorse languages all day at their day jobs.

The myth that they tell themselves is that $REVOLUTIONARY_FEATURE_Y will greatly improve their productivity, but the fact of the matter is usually that no matter how revolutionary the features, it's hard to overcome the benefits that come from an active ecosystem of well-tested and widely used libraries. Even if productivity is improved 20x by the revolutionary feature, a library that has 10 man-years of effort in it will take you 6 months to implement. Rinse and repeat.

This is not to mention the availability of online references and established conventions/best practices, the impact of hitting esoteric errors, and so on.

A good example of this is probably reddit. Originally written in Lisp, they eventually gave up and compromised down to Python due to improved tooling and library availability. [1]

[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

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