I deduce that some people prefer some tools, and you get a big win when you match a highly skilled person with tools they feel best augment those skills. Howeve

I deduce that some people prefer some tools, and you get a big win when you match a highly skilled person with tools they feel best augment those skills. However, it's the pairing that is the big win. If I had to guess as to which element was more important, I'd bet that the skilled person with imperfect tools is better than a Blub programmer with tools that are above him. PG left the equation, and when he did, a big argument in favor of keeping Lisp around did as well. Without another similarly skilled Lisp hacker to fill the void, it's easier to make a strong case for a more mainstream language so that ViaWeb could still maintain some forward velocity even if they never got to move quite as fast as they did when PG/Lisp were driving. tl;dr - I bet that it's not Lisp that made ViaWeb tick - it was Lisp + PG.