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Typed Python?

Paul Prescod paul at prescod.net
Wed Jul 7 11:49:06 EDT 2004 
Dominic wrote:

> 
>> What reminds me that LISP was used to write Yahoo! Store first...
> 
> 
> I read this a couple of times now.
> What was so great about Yahoo-Store?
> 
> Did they have a better design, a better
> architecture?
> 
> Or could they just mess around faster
> because they were doing it in a
> more dynamic language than e.g. C.

The funny thing is that Greg Stein et. al. implemented Microsoft's 
equivalent of Yahoo Store (Commerce server) in Python circa 1996.

http://www.lyra.org/greg/CaseStudy/

I don't know anything about commerce serving so I don't know how 
comparable they are but the stories sound eerily familiar:

Graham:

"In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup 
called Viaweb. Our plan was to write software that would let end users 
build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the time, 
was that it ran on our server, using ordinary Web pages as the interface."

Stein:

"In the Fall of 1995, eShop was somewhat at a crossroads. Its 
proprietary client and server were due out soon, yet the Web was taking 
off. On one hand, eShop wanted to continue to provide the best possible 
shopping experience possible, which required the custom client software; 
on the other hand, it was becoming obvious that a custom client was 
going to limit the acceptance of the eShop system. Customers were 
beginning to demand entirely Web-based software. Greg was charged with 
trying to find a way to create this "Lite" version of a shopping 
experience via a Web browser."

  Paul Prescod
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