I'll paraphrase Facebook themselves [1] back at the statement of yours that I disagree with ("His logic suggests so"): (A => B) !=> (B => A). That Viaweb was c

I'll paraphrase Facebook themselves [1] back at the statement of yours that I disagree with ("His logic suggests so"): (A => B) !=> (B => A). That Viaweb was competitive because of blub, does not imply that blub is a necessary condition for any company to be competitive, or that not-blub would impede Facebook from becoming successful. For example, if fast new features are only possible with blub, and new features are not as essential to Facebook's success as they were to Viaweb's, Facebook's use of not-blub (or perhaps, non-use of blub) would not materially impact Facebook's success. One way in which this might happen is: Viaweb is B2B, and its customers value new features; whilst Facebook is B2C and a social network i.e. the value is in the number of people on the platform, not its new features. Another explanation might actually just be that there was no high enough level language in Viaweb's days to compete with Lispers, and plenty in the PHP era. To an extent we witness this today with the myriad frameworks available which in theory eliminate any edge for fast prototyping except in safety-critical or performance-critical applications. [1] https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/01/08/A-implies-B-does-not-imply-B-implies-A.html https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/01/08/A-implies-B...