Trolling must be the only explanation, because a) Doing data mining research and exploratory programming in a small company is probably the best use case for a

Trolling must be the only explanation, because a) Doing data mining research and exploratory programming in a small company is probably the best use case for a Lisp. When you're Google you can afford to write this in C++ or Java (with layers of libraries taking the boiler plate out) as well waste research/prototype time on compile/link cycle (rather being able to program interactively). When you're Google, you can also afford to only hire machine learning people who know how to write production quality C++ (very rare combination of skills). Clojure is a more acceptable language: despite of what fanboys say, FP is not a black art reserved for 99.9th percentile programmers; the more C++ I write, the more convinced I get that C++ is. b) Clojure interop with Java makes it easy to use this sort of system with Hadoop, Mahout, Colt, etc... Sure there are more effective libraries available in C++, but they either proprietary to Google (MapReduce + GFS), not designed for fault tolerance (MPI) or more time consuming to use (LINPACK, LAPACK) c) Python is going to be 10-20 times slower, (perhaps 5x when you're using C interop).