4 ms·

The other side of massive isolated productivity is: nobody except them knew it or could maintain it. Yahoo ended up doing the whole "rewrite lisp in C++" thing

by seiji 11y ago

The other side of massive isolated productivity is: nobody except them knew it or could maintain it. Yahoo ended up doing the whole "rewrite lisp in C++" thing because you can't hire "experts in paul graham's custom lisp macros" at scale. But, it worked, didn't it? Grow, scale, cash out, dump code on non-founders, become startup messiah.

mbrock 11y ago
Yeah, it all depends on what you're trying to do. I'd also wager that Graham et al simply had more fun writing Lisp than any other language, and I grant them the right to do whatever they like. Yahoo presumably bought the product because they found it valuable. If they found that rewriting Lisp in C++ was the only way to get people to work on it, I don't question their business decision, although it does seem like a kind of "now you have two problems" situation. (Personally I find C++ way more difficult than anything I've seen in Lisp.)
braythwayt 11y ago
Let’s see now. Paul Graham wrote viaweb in Lisp and claims it was a competitive advantage for a startup. What is his track record with startup(s)? Do we just count N=1? Or do we include what YCombinator has accomplished? Now let’s look at what Yahoo has accomplished as a BigCo. Under the circumstances, would you bet that Paul was right about Lisp, Yahoo about C++, neither, or both? I’d go with Paul being right about Lisp, and Yahoo, well... I’d call that N=1 at best. Clearly they started from a “We already have hordes of C++ programmers” point of view, and a “We apply hordes or programmers to every problem” point of view. It might be the only point of view for them. It could very well be that there were hundreds of Lisp programmers available, but none might have wanted to work for Yahoo under any circumstances. Your mileage may well differ, based on the overlap in the venn diagram of language, culture, and problem set.
- S4M 11y ago
  One thing that people forgot to mention is that Paul Graham was a Lisp expert before he started Viaweb - he had already written _On_Lisp_ which is still considered as one of the references to learn Common Lisp - and probably Robert Morris wasn't a bad lisper as well. They most likely were much better programmers than their competitors or Yahoo's median employee, so while Lisp may have been a competitive advantage for them, it wasn't the one that gave them the strongest edge. We don't have the data of how Lisp experts fare against equally strong C++ (or some other language) - although it may be that Lisp magnifies programmer's strength.
  - will_pseudonym 11y ago
    If they're such great programmers, don't you think they would also be really good at understanding what tools give them a competitive advantage? ;) "...it may be that Lisp magnifies programmers' strength," doesn't seem fair in this light.
  - braythwayt 11y ago
    If we take Paul’s “The Python Paradox” essay, and turn its conclusions up to eleven, we might end up with this extreme perspective: Perhaps great programmers are great in any language, and a company employing great programmer will have great results in any language, it’s the programmers that are the competitive advantage for a startup. But although they’d be great in any language, they have taste, and prefer to work in some languages regardless of whether that is a competitive advantage or not. And therefore, they prefer jobs and startups with languages that match their taste. And taking that a step forward, these mythical great programmers might prefer working with other people they perceive have taste, so they tend to clump together, and they see the language choice as a kind of signal of what kind of colleagues they will have working for a particular company. If all this handwaving has merit, it could be that choosing to do your startup in Lisp when Paul started ViaWeb was’t 100% about having a competitive advantage from Lisp itself, it was having a competitive advantage from having Paul and Robert, and anybody else they hired. --- With larger companies, they will never say it, but sometimes they don’t want these “great programmers,” with their taste and their salary demands, and their code that causes an army of middle-of-the-road workmanlike programmers to stare thoughtfully for long periods of time working out how it does what it does. Even if they end up being more productive, perhaps they end up being less predictable, because a smaller team of better programmers is more vulnerable to poaching as the company goes from developing the next big thing to an endless march of adding small enterprisey features. Even if you write in Scala, Haskell, Lisp, or Clojure, when the work becomes maintaining Yahoo... Maybe you don’t want people who relish a challenge, because they’ll quit. So you want to anti-signal, by rewriting it all in a workmanlike language, so you get workmanlike people. And if it takes touch longer or costs a bit more overall, it’s predictable because the people are more fungible. They’re easier to replace. So it could very well be that when you’re launching a startup, you want to go out on a limb and choose the language based on the kind of people you want to hire for a startup. And when you mature, you might rewrite it in another language based on the kind of people you want to hire for a mature company. And both choices might be right for their times. And neither might actually have anything to do with the “power” or “expressiveness” or “abstraction” of the language itself.
icebraining 11y ago
"Dump code on non-founders"? It's not like Yahoo was forced to take it; including the cost of dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the technology they're buying into the ROI calculation is their job. Assuming that cost was actually significant, pg et all paid the price in the form of a lower offer.
raspasov 11y ago
You sound like a hater.

by seiji 11y ago

mbrock 11y ago

Yeah, it all depends on what you're trying to do. I'd also wager that Graham et al simply had more fun writing Lisp than any other language, and I grant them the right to do whatever they like. Yahoo presumably bought the product because they found it valuable. If they found that rewriting Lisp in C++ was the only way to get people to work on it, I don't question their business decision, although it does seem like a kind of "now you have two problems" situation. (Personally I find C++ way more difficult than anything I've seen in Lisp.)

braythwayt 11y ago

Let’s see now. Paul Graham wrote viaweb in Lisp and claims it was a competitive advantage for a startup. What is his track record with startup(s)? Do we just count N=1? Or do we include what YCombinator has accomplished? Now let’s look at what Yahoo has accomplished as a BigCo. Under the circumstances, would you bet that Paul was right about Lisp, Yahoo about C++, neither, or both? I’d go with Paul being right about Lisp, and Yahoo, well... I’d call that N=1 at best. Clearly they started from a “We already have hordes of C++ programmers” point of view, and a “We apply hordes or programmers to every problem” point of view. It might be the only point of view for them. It could very well be that there were hundreds of Lisp programmers available, but none might have wanted to work for Yahoo under any circumstances. Your mileage may well differ, based on the overlap in the venn diagram of language, culture, and problem set.

S4M 11y ago
One thing that people forgot to mention is that Paul Graham was a Lisp expert before he started Viaweb - he had already written _On_Lisp_ which is still considered as one of the references to learn Common Lisp - and probably Robert Morris wasn't a bad lisper as well. They most likely were much better programmers than their competitors or Yahoo's median employee, so while Lisp may have been a competitive advantage for them, it wasn't the one that gave them the strongest edge. We don't have the data of how Lisp experts fare against equally strong C++ (or some other language) - although it may be that Lisp magnifies programmer's strength.
- will_pseudonym 11y ago
  If they're such great programmers, don't you think they would also be really good at understanding what tools give them a competitive advantage? ;) "...it may be that Lisp magnifies programmers' strength," doesn't seem fair in this light.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  If we take Paul’s “The Python Paradox” essay, and turn its conclusions up to eleven, we might end up with this extreme perspective: Perhaps great programmers are great in any language, and a company employing great programmer will have great results in any language, it’s the programmers that are the competitive advantage for a startup. But although they’d be great in any language, they have taste, and prefer to work in some languages regardless of whether that is a competitive advantage or not. And therefore, they prefer jobs and startups with languages that match their taste. And taking that a step forward, these mythical great programmers might prefer working with other people they perceive have taste, so they tend to clump together, and they see the language choice as a kind of signal of what kind of colleagues they will have working for a particular company. If all this handwaving has merit, it could be that choosing to do your startup in Lisp when Paul started ViaWeb was’t 100% about having a competitive advantage from Lisp itself, it was having a competitive advantage from having Paul and Robert, and anybody else they hired. --- With larger companies, they will never say it, but sometimes they don’t want these “great programmers,” with their taste and their salary demands, and their code that causes an army of middle-of-the-road workmanlike programmers to stare thoughtfully for long periods of time working out how it does what it does. Even if they end up being more productive, perhaps they end up being less predictable, because a smaller team of better programmers is more vulnerable to poaching as the company goes from developing the next big thing to an endless march of adding small enterprisey features. Even if you write in Scala, Haskell, Lisp, or Clojure, when the work becomes maintaining Yahoo... Maybe you don’t want people who relish a challenge, because they’ll quit. So you want to anti-signal, by rewriting it all in a workmanlike language, so you get workmanlike people. And if it takes touch longer or costs a bit more overall, it’s predictable because the people are more fungible. They’re easier to replace. So it could very well be that when you’re launching a startup, you want to go out on a limb and choose the language based on the kind of people you want to hire for a startup. And when you mature, you might rewrite it in another language based on the kind of people you want to hire for a mature company. And both choices might be right for their times. And neither might actually have anything to do with the “power” or “expressiveness” or “abstraction” of the language itself.

icebraining 11y ago

"Dump code on non-founders"? It's not like Yahoo was forced to take it; including the cost of dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the technology they're buying into the ROI calculation is their job. Assuming that cost was actually significant, pg et all paid the price in the form of a lower offer.

raspasov 11y ago

You sound like a hater.