A Server-Side Scripting Language with a Lisp

Recently, the editors at Web Techniques were asked to take a look at the new version of Morph Technology's Dynamorph, a server-side scripting language for the Web. Two items immediately caught our eye. First, the language looks a bit like Lisp, and second is its claims to speed.

With regard to syntax, Marc Slack, president of Morph Technology, explains that it is a functional, as opposed to procedural language:

In simpler terms what we are interested in for Web publishing is having commands that return results rather than relying upon print commands to generate results. So if we want to insert the current time into our Web page we simply place <#time#> in our HTML document where we would like it to appear. The more traditional approach, and that taken by our competitors, would require you to use a print statement of some sort in order to instruct the system to output text into the document. With our approach, all commands return results that can be fed to other commands as input very cleanly. This make for very elegant solutions.

As far as performance, the benchmarks on their Web site tell their story.