untyping: Happy Valentine's from Untyped

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February 14, 2008

Happy Valentine's from Untyped

For Valentine's Day we have created a new website, Smut Shorts. If you have something to say about love or lust, and can do so in 500 characters or less, then please add it to the growing number of “shorts”. It's anonymous and fun. Just, no porn thanks.

If you're reading this site, you're probably interested in the technical details behind Smut Shorts. It is a collaboration between a number of people, most of whom have chosen to be anonymous. The majority of the coding was done by yours truly, and therefore in Scheme. It is running on the PLT Scheme webserver (version 3.99) and uses PostgreSQL as the back-end. I coded it up in about two days. It was a side-project, so it was a bit of rush job and there is lots still to do. If you break the site let me know and I'll try to fix it.

A few interesting lessons were learned from doing this site. It all comes down to scalability, which is something that has recently been on my mind a lot. In this case we want to scale down to the low end — the guy who is just hacking up something in his spare time and wants to get it done in a hurry. Our frameworks, Snooze and Lylux, are pretty good but they don't support a fast start. You have to create a whole bunch of files before you've even got your first page up. Furthermore, we've always avoided creating a templating mechanism, as we've said that we'd rather use smart people who can balance parens than create this unnecessary divide between designers and programmers. I now recognise this is a mistake. Had we a templating mechanism I could have pushed more design work to my collaborators. It's not that they're stupid (far far from it) but they're busy and don't have time to learn even Scheme basics just so they change a few lines of text. If we're gonna grow the Scheme web-hacking community it has to start with dudes messing around in their spare time, so we need to address the low-end of scale. The high end of scale can wait till the IPO ;-)

Posted by Noel at February 14, 2008 01:46 PM

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Comments

I see an ampersand followed by "emdash" in your article. That suggests ... well, you know what it suggests.

Posted by: The Seattle Nitpicker at February 14, 2008 08:58 PM

Yeah, guilty as charged. I fixed it up pretty pronto.

Posted by: Noel at February 15, 2008 05:50 AM

I was actually pretty close to having a handle on how scheme works, but as soon as I found out I was going to have to compile something, I suddenly remembered how much else I needed to get done before the day is out. Was out. Would need. You know what I am trying to say. Got real busy when I read "compile." For 80% of the design work that needed doing, the web developer toolbar and a little CSS would have gone a long way.

Posted by: crash at February 18, 2008 03:00 AM