>Why would you even change your server if a new one came out?
Woo is many times faster than Hunchentoot. And projects can die.
>a person needs to understand the problem a tool solves before using the tool; otherwise you're training a code monkey, not a programmer.
There's a reason we use high-level languages: They hide irrelevant details. You shouldn't have to learn how TCP works or know every detail of HTTP to know what can be done with it.
Because in the real world of web development applications are hardly ever written directly on top of the server. They are written on a framework, that sits on top of an HTTP server abstraction (like Clack), that has pluggable servers.
That way, if a new server comes out (e.g. Woo[0]), you don't have to learn all of its internals and rewrite the entire application using it -- you literally just change a keyword argument in a single function call, and now your application is running on a different, much faster server. If someone writes a plugin for Clack (e.g. clack-errors[1]), all applications built on any Clack framework using whatever server can use it. A Hunchentoot plugin works for Hunchentoot applications.
Using Clack is sustainable web development.
Sure, for a five minute demo, Hunchentoot is fine. But why teach bad practices?
You can't build a web application on Hunchentoot -- a basic HTTP server -- and call it modern. Take a look at Clack for the actual modern approach: http://clacklisp.org/
Yes.