4 ms·
> Honestly curious why Lisp has so much admiration and praise on HN. Paul Graham and Robert Tappan Morris, two of the founders of YCombinator, love Lisp/Scheme
by wolfgke 9y ago
> Honestly curious why Lisp has so much admiration and praise on HN.
Paul Graham and Robert Tappan Morris, two of the founders of YCombinator, love Lisp/Scheme. They got rich by selling their company Viaweb to Yahoo. You guessed it: Viaweb was written in LISP and Paul Graham believes that this was their secret weapon:
> http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Also the software that drives Hacker News is written in Arc, a Lisp dialect that was invented by Paul Graham.
So Hacker News and YCombinator are indeed at least historically very attached to Lisp/Scheme.
- hbk 9y agoAlso Y Combinator is a technique to do recursion on lambda calculus which lisp is built upon.
- mbrodersen 9y agoHaskell (and other functional languages) is also built on the lambda calculus. Lisp isn't special in that regard.
- mattmanser 9y agoWhich promptly got rewritten after pg left. EDIT: From the years being here, and having played with LISP myself, it's a language that appeals to a certain type of programmer, who claim to find it very productive compared to other languages. And everyone else hates it. So you pick a LISP language you're severely limiting your hire pool.
- kamaal 9y agoThe whole point of picking Lisp as a language for many people is to have a hiring pool of small but good programmers.
- flavio81 9y ago>So you pick a LISP language you're severely limiting your hire pool. I'd rather have 5 very good Lisp programmers than 50 code monkeys.
- vzcx 9y agoI might even prefer 5 average lisp programmers to 50 code monkeys.
- mbrodersen 9y agoI'd rather have 5 very good programmers (using ANY language) than 50 code monkeys (using ANY language). The problem with the Lisp programmers is that they very likely would not be able to work as a team.
- lispm 9y agoI think this claim has no base. I've worked with Lisp programmers and there was no special problem doing so.
- mbrodersen 9y agoSo what? 10000+ companies were successful with software not written in Lisp. Biz success is not decided by the programming language you use.