Elnode, the EmacsLisp webserver, nears release (opens in new tab)

Rolling things up into a single response here:

    1.  Emacs Lisp is a real Lisp.  Full stop.
    2.  That said, Emacs Lisp is based on MacLisp (no
        relationship to Macintosh), which has dynamic scoping,
        not lexical scoping, and which is not a member of the
        Common Lisp family.
    3.  And *that* said, Emacs Lisp has long had a "cl" 
        package that adds many Common Lisp niceties, and, 
        since 24, has had optional lexical scoping, bringing a 
        more Common-Lisp-like experience to all aspects of
        elisp.
    4.  And all of *that* said, this particular package I 
        regard as a convenience, not a way to write a website.  
        There are many tools a devoted Emacser uses (org mode 
        and Planner mode, to name the two big ones) that want 
        to vend web pages, and this would be a great tool for 
        them, but I'd hardly recommend using elisp for a 
        "real" website.

It's completely worth learning elisp, and I think discounting this because it's "not written in a real Lisp" is bizarre, but you'd be right to look more towards Clojure or SBCL/Clozure (depending) to write a "real" Lisp website. That's just not what this is aimed at--and where it is aimed, I think it can be enormously successful.

There weren't enough in the article?

It is a real lisp. I think the problem you're experiencing is that EmacsLisp has a long history. So some things that have been said were said a loooong time ago and are no longer relevant.

Take a look at the other articles I have on my blog... it's clear EmacsLisp is a modern, usable, language.

Sorry, what exactly makes it "not a real lisp"? Maybe that statement is out of date, considering the addition of lexical scoping in Emacs 2.4.

Regardless, it seems like the author is able to build some real things. I know, for example, that you can run a simple file-directory server using elnode.

What is the definition of a real lisp? AFAIK lisp is just a family of computer languages. Elisp certainly isn't the most powerful or full featured but it still seems to have most of the characteristics.

I would say that it isn't worth letting the differences between emacs lisp and common lisp stand in the way of learning lisp (or Emacs).

wow. yeah, that could be awesome. I'd like to write an elnode adapter for that.

Is it packaged and in MELPA or Marmalade?

If it doesn't handle POST requests it doesn't count.

  (defun phase-handle-post ()
    "Phase handler for post requests"
    ;; XXXX hack, not handling multi-part form data, just treat as a GET
    ;; for now.
    (phase-handle-get) )

Emacs webservers have indeed been around for years: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/HttpServer

Most of them required other solutions for accepting the socket however and also failed to address concurrency.

Elnode, btw, does reuse Emacs' syntax highlighting code. Just try it out and see what it's like.

I really want to use this professionally. Lisp is so much more productive (for me at least) than other languages. I just don't want to have to use much else.

Let's see how we get on with just emacs? Elnode can communicate (asynchronously) with lots of other Elnode nodes... the Elnode RLE module (https://github.com/nicferrier/elnode/blob/master/elnode-rle....) provides code to spin up those nodes and offload processing to them.

I think you could scale with just Emacs.

Yes, as I said at the end, that's coming. Hopefully this week. It was important to get Elnode 0.9.9 out first.