Re: Gathering data on user preferences

[Arthur Miller]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> tomas@tuxteam.de writes:
>>>>>
>>>>>> As a small nit: why JSON and not S-expressions? We're lispies, after
>>>>>> all ;-)
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Only because from a web perspective, middleware to process body contents
>>>>> consisting of JSON are plentiful, while libraries for s-expressions are
>>>>> not.  
>>>>
>>>> But you would be processing them in Emacs which is very good at processing 
>>>> both
>>>> text and s-expressions? :)
>>>
>>> Why would you be processing them in Emacs? If you had a web service, the
>>> last thing you would have is Emacs sitting behind the web server. You
>>> would use something better suited which would process the data from the
>>> POST request which then stores the data in some format. You might have
>>> Emacs be able to query that data to get reports. 
>>
>> Just save a byte stream, and then process in Emacs?
>
> But why? There are loads of libraries which can do all the necessary
> processing and storage of results that would be almost trivial to
> assemble and the data would be processed as soon as it arrives - all
> done without need for human intervention.

Who said human intervention? :-)

I see emacs as a good tool for shell scripting and text processing. In general I
am surprised that lisp(s) are second grade citizens in the land of web scraping,
text processing etc, python being No 1 atm and js no2.

Thomas asked why not s-exps? And I also wonder. If we sent s-exps over the wire,
maybe it would be less processing involved? Write incomming s-exp to emacs
server socket? Is it too wild to think of? :)

> boring task best left to machines I think.

Of course, my thoughts as well, anytime!