This question reminds me of a story about Yahoo! Stores, which came out of Yahoo!’s acquisition of Viaweb, cofounded by PG. As he has frequently mentioned, Viaw

This question reminds me of a story about Yahoo! Stores, which came out of Yahoo!’s acquisition of Viaweb, cofounded by PG. As he has frequently mentioned, Viaweb was written in Lisp and he felt they got an inherent advantage by using Lisp [0]. Several years after Yahoo! acquired Viaweb I was having lunch with the then-VP in charge of Stores and other business products, who was not from the original Viaweb team. The Yahoo! team was rewriting Stores in C++ (and Perl, apparently from a current Google search, although I only remember him mentioning C++). He kind of rolled his eyes when he said for some reason the original team wrote it in Lisp. He said it was hard to hire Lisp programmers to join the team. PG was not well-known yet, so even if we could just search the web to find his reasoning for using Lisp (the article was written in 2001), we wouldn’t have thought of searching. But even if we had found it, I don’t think it would have mattered. There’s a different set of advantages and tradeoffs for a small team building a new product, when they are focused on fast development and growth and they come from a similar background, vs. a team in a larger company that has people coming and going and wants the ability to hire from the general developer pool without having to train everyone on a less-common language. Disclaimers: this is a generalization, of course. You might be able to point to counterexamples. Some larger companies are more willing to hire language specialists and experts. I’m just relaying what I was told. Please don’t angrily debate me on the benefits of languages like Elixir and Lisp. Your anger would be misplaced. Personally I absolutely love those kinds of languages and would much, much rather use them than something like Java [1]. That’s why I stayed a hacker my whole career and never became a manager. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html