Can lisp be an effective commerical application delivery language?

[Paul Prescod]

Kelly Murray wrote:
>  You have a persistent lisp web server running on some machine, maybe
> on a unix machine, maybe the same as the one on your desk.
> There is this tiny C program on your machine called "wsh"
> that does a typical UNIX thing, takes a string argument on stdin,
> contacts this web server, passes the string as a URL,
> and then copies the results back to stdout.
> 
> % websh list-users
> alex
> bob
> cathy
> %
> 
> This tiny program just executed lisp code on the
> persistent lisp web server which executed probably just as
> fast or faster than doing a cat on /etc/passwd.

#1. Why in the world would you use the HTTP protocol for this?

#2. Why would this be as fast or faster than doing a cat on /etc/passwd?
I cannot believe that HTTP is as fast as NFS or Novell.

#3. How do I do *writes*. HTTP is really poor at two-way communication.
 
#4. What do interactive apps look like?

 Paul Prescod