4 ms·

Part of the reason is Paul Graham's essay about his experience using Lisp at a startup: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

• twunde 7y ago
  To add further clarification, Paul Graham was one of the founders of YC and built Hacker News in a LISP dialect named Arc (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9270478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9270478 for more information).
  • harperlee 7y ago
    ...and wrote a couple of classical common lisp books. He has obviously contributed a lot to HN’s culture. I personally found out about both reddit and HN by means of deeping further into lisp in the internet, beyond his “ANSI Common Lisp” book which I used in university.
• eof 7y ago
  That essay sent me down the functional language paradigm. I never did a lot of lisp but have done a lot of Haskell since. I don’t get to do near as much these days, but the lessons I’ve learned have made me a better developer for sure. Type safety and pure functions make debugging and refactoring an entirely different beast
• punnerud 7y ago
  And HN was (or still is?) written in Lisp
  • big_chungus 7y ago
    Still is, as far as I know. Technically ARC, which is a descendant and in the same family.