Lisp certainly wasn't in vogue when Paul Graham did his startup and wrote those essays. "Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason not t

Lisp certainly wasn't in vogue when Paul Graham did his startup and wrote those essays. "Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp. We knew that everyone else was writing their software in C++ or Perl. But we also knew that that didn't mean anything. If you chose technology that way, you'd be running Windows. When you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best." "This is especially true in a startup. In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do. I don't think a lot of people realize this, even in startups." [...] "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." http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html