[pro] How to interact with a running lisp instance?

[Scott L. Burson]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 11:16 AM, Ryan Davis <ryan at acceleration.net> wrote:
> We do something like this.  For lisp websites my company makes, we have
> a password-protected admin section with some light UI to help us manage
> the site (turn logging levels up/down, clear caches, etc), and one of
> those tools is a "evaluate this code in the running lisp" textarea, with
> a dropdown to select what package it runs in.  This is very rarely used
> to patch the site in emergency situations or for trivial changes where
> we don't want to bring down the site.  This has bit us a few times,
> where we fixed a small bug directly in the running lisp and then forgot
> to publish the new code and had mystery regressions when the lisp
> process was restarted.

A really funny cautionary tale about this sort of thing:

  http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Designed-For-Reliability.aspx

-- Scott