Lisp Essential, But Not Required

Here’s a weird little success story involving Lisp. The code doesn’t rely on anything specific to Lisp. It could be rewritten in any language. Yet it wouldn’t have been written in the first place if it weren’t for Lisp.

I like to keep a Lisp REPL open in my Emacs for tinkering around with programming ideas. It only takes a moment to hook up a REST API or scrape some subprocess output, so I have a library of primitives that can talk to our internal build tools and other auxiliary tools such as GitHub or CircleCI. This comes in handy for random ad hoc scripting.

I found out that CircleCI is written in Clojure, and if you connect to your local CircleCI server, you can start a REPL and run queries on the internal CircleCI database. Naturally, I hooked up my local REPL to the Clojure REPL so I could send expressions over to be evaluated. We had multiple CircleCI servers running, so I could use my local Lisp to coordinate activity between the several CircleCI REPLs.

Then a need arose to transfer projects from one CircleCI server to another. My library had all the core capabilities, so I soon had a script for transferring projects. But after transferring a project, we had to fix up the branch protection in GitHub. The GitHub primitives came in handy. Of course our internal systems had to be informed that the project moved, but I had scripting primitives for that system as well.

More requirements arose: package the tool into a docker image, deploy it as a microservice, launch it as a kubernetes batch job, etc. At each point, the existing body of code was 90% of the solution, so it only required small changes to the code to handle the new requirements. As of now, the CircleCI migration tool is deployed as a service used by dozens of our engineers.

Now Lisp isn’t directly necessary for this project. It could easily (for some definitions of easy) be rewritten in another language. But the initial idea of connecting to a Clojure REPL from another Lisp is an obvious thing to try out and only takes moments to code up. If I were coding in another language, I could connect to the REPL, but then I’d have to translate between my other language and Lisp. It’s not an obvious thing to try out and would take a long time to code up. So while this project could be written in another language, it never would have been. And Lisp’s flexibility meant that there was never a reason for a rewrite, even as the requirements were changing.