Re:Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
by librarian42 on Monday January 03, 2022 @08:58AM
(#29780792)
I can't even. Did they use the one that's basically Forth with a string stack (No, not Postscript, Forth with a string stack) or the one that's basically m4 (the higher level of the two sendmail scripting languages) implemented in Forth with a string stack?
Re:Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
by bitwize on Monday January 03, 2022 @11:52AM
(#29782818)
I think they used MPI (the m4-like one) because it is much easier to retrofit as a sort of templating language for use in web pages back in the 90s when that was a thing, as opposed to the modern practice of maintaining an entire parallel-universe DOM which is then transformed into the real DOM. MUF (the Forth-like one) was a bit too low-level for the application, though I do seem to recall a story this same furry wrote in which a fantasy CPU is mentioned that runs MUF natively, like a Lisp machine but for furry roleplay environments. I won't get into the uses to which it was put.
There was a furry who worked as a web developer for a small firm. He had built their back-end runtime in MUCK scripting language. (A MUCK is like a MUD, but without the statistics and stuff, so it's much less a role-playing game than it is simply role-playing.) Eventually he was fired, probably because he spent more time pretending to be a highly sexualized female fox on MUCKs than doing his job, but the back end to all their web apps was written in MUCK code -- and few non-furries even knew what a MUCK was let alone how to program one. So the befuddled engineers who remained had to figure out how to modify the code without their vulpine-in-his-own-mind former colleague.
They uh, also didn't notice the backdoor he put into the web server that allowed him to spy on their activities, even though he was gone from the company...