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[–]magnora7 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Reddit was originally written in LISP and Aaron Swartz was the one to port it from LISP to python, and that's the code we use today

[–]Extract 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Ah. Hard to believe how much he did for reddit, when you think about it.

He would certainly make something akin to saidit himself if he was alive today.

[–]magnora7 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah he was a software/programming genius, on top of being a sociological genius. He wrote so many useful web frameworks in his short time, it's incredible.

He would certainly make something akin to saidit himself if he was alive today.

I like to think so too. He's probably be working on some decentralization social media project akin to www.notabug.io or lemmy or mastodon. Or maybe he'd have found something even more important to work on. The guy could hit targets no one else could even see.

[–]cloudrabbit[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

What was spez' contribution when Reddit was starting out?

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Spez (Huffman) wrote the original LISP version of reddit.

From wikipedia:

During spring break of his senior year at UVA, Huffman and college roommate Alexis Ohanian[1] drove to Boston, Massachusetts, to attend a lecture[6] delivered by programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham.[1][7] Huffman and Ohanian talked with Graham after the lecture and he invited them to apply to his startup incubator Y Combinator.[1] Huffman came up with their original idea, My Mobile Menu,[7] which was intended to allow users to order food by SMS.[1][7] The idea was rejected, but Graham asked Huffman and Ohanian to meet him in Boston to pitch another idea for a start-up; it was at this brainstorming session that the idea for what Graham called the "front page of the Internet" was created.[1] Huffman and Ohanian were accepted in Y Combinator's first class.[1][7] Huffman coded the entire site in Lisp.[8][9] He and Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005, funded by Y Combinator.[5][10]

The site’s audience grew rapidly in its first few months, and by August 2005, Huffman noticed their habitual user-base had grown so large that he no longer needed to fill the front page with content himself.[8][11][12] At 23, Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million.[1][13] Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.

Swarz came around in "fall 2005"

In early fall of 2005, Swartz worked with his fellow co-founders of another nascent Y-Combinator firm Reddit, to rewrite Reddit's Lisp codebase using Python and web.py

So according to that, it was launched in LISP in June 2005 and then Swartz re-wrote the whole thing in python in early fall 2005. So it sounds like reddit's LISP version was only operational for a couple of months in total! So basically the entirety of it's existence is from Swartz's code