Re: continuations in the real world?

[Matthias Felleisen <address@hidden>]

  > Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 11:17:22 -0800 (PST)
  > From: Avi Bryant <avi@beta4.com>
  > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
  > Sender: owner-ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
  > Precedence: bulk
  > 
  > On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
  > 
  > >   What's ironic is that a lot of these sites using "session variables"
  > >   store them in a way that is no more persistent, distributed, or
  > >   load-balanced than server-side continuations would be.
  > >
  > > Ah, but that's all academic. They use good scripting languages, they make
  > > money, and that's enough, isn't it? -- Matthias
  > ;-)
  > 
  > Not if you can Beat The Averages and make more money, faster, by using
  > them.  As I mentioned in the Demystifying Continuations thread, my
  > recently released web framework at http://beta4.com/seaside makes heavy
  > use of call/cc - roughly speaking, it's NeXT's WebObjects system,
  > implemented in Smalltalk, and using continuations for a large part of
  > session state.  For those who use it, even (especially?) those who know
  > nothing about continuations, it's not just of academic interest to be able
  > to layer normal control flow over the HTTP request/response loop and get
  > transparent backtracking to boot.  I know from personal experience that
  > the use of continuations has a profound simplifying effect on the
  > architecture of large web applications, and from what I'm hearing from
  > early users of the framework, they're discovering the same thing -
  > smalltalkers may not be used to dealing with full continuations, but they
  > know good magic when they see it.

Isn't it neat stuff? Good luck making money on that. -- Matthias

See: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/index.html#esop2001-gkvf