Quoting PG used to be all the rage around here, but it seems to have gone somewhat out of fashion. Anyway, he basically credits the power of Lisp with the succe

Quoting PG used to be all the rage around here, but it seems to have gone somewhat out of fashion. Anyway, he basically credits the power of Lisp with the success of Viaweb, in exactly the way you suggest: If other companies didn't want to use Lisp, so much the better. It might give us a technological edge, and we needed all the help we could get. When we started Viaweb, we had no experience in business. We didn't know anything about marketing, or hiring people, or raising money, or getting customers. Neither of us had ever even had what you would call a real job. The only thing we were good at was writing software. We hoped that would save us. Any advantage we could get in the software department, we would take. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html