>You do realize Hacker News itself is a Lisp application on the web?
...and now we finally arrive at the fundamental quarrel that I have with using the terms "web" and "application", such that, when linked, can lead to a state of confusion about the nature of the technologies involved.
In the generic sense, there is application vs theory, so that everything that has to do with a real computer program is always going to be an "application", and therefore, any arbitrary program that is used as a backend for a website, can indeed be called something of an "application for the web".
But this is not what normal human beings are thinking about when they use the word "application" in conjunction with their own computing devices. They are thinking about whatever is running on their machine that they can sense, and can thus physically interact with.
In this way, the correct dichotomy is application vs service. So, the Lisp backend for HN is just a service for the user facing application (the web browser).
All of this goes hand-in-hand with my larger point about styles of informing that are not quite as informative as they can possibly be.
...and now we finally arrive at the fundamental quarrel that I have with using the terms "web" and "application", such that, when linked, can lead to a state of confusion about the nature of the technologies involved.
In the generic sense, there is application vs theory, so that everything that has to do with a real computer program is always going to be an "application", and therefore, any arbitrary program that is used as a backend for a website, can indeed be called something of an "application for the web".
But this is not what normal human beings are thinking about when they use the word "application" in conjunction with their own computing devices. They are thinking about whatever is running on their machine that they can sense, and can thus physically interact with.
In this way, the correct dichotomy is application vs service. So, the Lisp backend for HN is just a service for the user facing application (the web browser).
All of this goes hand-in-hand with my larger point about styles of informing that are not quite as informative as they can possibly be.