Cryptosmith

John Fremlin has implemented a dynamic web server in Lisp. He claims that it beats the socks off of everything else. If we’re comparing Lisp against PHP, Python, Ruby, and similar scripting languages, I wouldn’t be surprised if he proves to be right.

Lisp is almost the closest-to-the-machine text language interpreter there is. Forth might beat it for closest, but Lisp is soo much more powerful. Moreover, it’s possible to build sane programs in Lisp that you can actually analyze. That gives us a slight hope of building reliable and secure web servers as opposed to the cobbled together things we have to live with.

I occasionally muse about the “security features” of my blogging software. It’s nice to have a variety of ‘roles’ to choose from. It’s nice to say that this is ‘private’ or that is ‘unpublished.’ But as far as I can tell, there’s no published description of what the designers think the security measures are supposed to do. There is no apparent security model or policy statement. How can you have ‘security’ if you don’t ever decide what the word means?

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