Building Supplies January 8th, 2016
Patrick Stein

I have a couple of nascent projects on my plate which require custom, server-side software. I’ve been trying to use these projects to explore the Clean Architecture concepts using Test-Driven Development (TDD).

I can’t even begin.

According to Clean Architecture, I should start with my application logic independent of whether it will be a command-line tool, a series of tools, a web-application, or what-have-you. So, let me start on the application code.

This is TDD though. So, I need to start with a test. How do I do that?

(ql:quickload :nst)

(nst:def-test-group querying-data () ...)

Wait a minute? I just committed myself to Lisp. I just made a huge business decision, a huge implementation decision, a decision that will shape my life for the next n years, and neither TDD or Clean Architecture had anything to say.

I need building supplies. I can’t go anywhere with my architecture or my development without a programming language.

I want to write my apps in Lisp. One of them, I already have mostly done in Lisp. I am still trepidatious about deploying Lisp.

Why am I trepidatious about deploying Lisp? Is it because there is inadequate support for web programming in Lisp? Absolutely not. Is it because I have some doubt in Lisp’s staying power? Absolutely not.

It’s email. Email is holding me back.

I use my current web hosting provider to give me a LAMP stack upon which I run WordPress for this blog and some git repositories and a bug-tracking database (that I can’t remember how to log into). All of that, I could move with confidence in a few hours.

What I dread is having to collect the several hundred mail-forwards that I currently have along with the half-dozen IMAP accounts and move them anywhere, let alone to somewhere that I have to manage them myself and deal with SPAM and mail queues and crap.

It seems that for only a few bucks more per month than I’m paying now, I can get Plesk on a VPS that should be big enough for my purposes. Does anyone have any experience with Plesk? Is it going to make email painless for me on Ubuntu? Or, am I going to hate my life? Does someone have a VPS provider they strongly recommend?

Do I really have to write my application in PHP on the chance that I’ll want to deploy it on the web just because email is scary?

l