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While being a part of YC doesn't affect our plans or change our use of Kickstarter as a means of accelerating the release of Light Table, many pledged with

by Cushman 14y ago

While being a part of YC doesn't affect our plans or change our use of Kickstarter as a means of accelerating the release of Light Table, many pledged with the explicit purpose of making sure that it had a chance. With YC that chance is now safe and we wanted to let our supporters know there will be no hard feelings if this changes your desire to pledge. Light Table uses Kickstarter to demonstrate market demand, YC responds to demand with funding, Light Table effectively offers to buy back Kickstarter pledges with YC money just to be nice. Wacky. There are a lot of ways to read the situation, but my favorite is that Light Table makes sense purely as a strategic acquisition for YC; there are enough YC companies using the languages Light Table targets that, should it yield magical productivity gains, the knock-on effects from being able to get their developers early access and input would be enormous. If they wind up changing the future of software development, all the better.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Please add double-lines to your comment so it's readable, thanks! :)
- Cushman 14y ago
  Hah, sorry. Forgot to read my own writing!
batista 14y ago
>There are a lot of ways to read the situation, but my favorite is that Light Table makes sense purely as a strategic acquisition for YC; there are enough YC companies using the languages Light Table targets that, should it yield magical productivity gains, the knock-on effects from being able to get their developers early access and input would be enormous. If they wind up changing the future of software development, all the better.* This sounds like a really lame conspiracy theory. YC got LT to "yield magical productivity gains" to it's companies? Please. Even if the programmers dropped their editors (Emacs, etc) to adopt LT, the productivity gains would be marginal. And code productivity at that level is not the bottleneck for a startup success either. A decent product people want to use, connections, and chance are far more important. For all the "we used Lisp so we did it faster/better" bragging, Yahoo could almost just as easily buy any other ViaWeb competitor for example, even one using the lamest of methodologies. Downvotes? People believe that using a better editor/IDE will yield "magical productivity gains" for a company? Or that ViaWeb succeeded because it was in Lisp? Well, how about the other 99% of companies, that succeeded based on lame technologies, from Facebook's PHP, to whatever. One company doing something successfully among thousands is as far from a proof as you can get. Post-fact rationalization sounds more like it ("Oh, we got bought. It was because we were ultra-productive programmers yielding Lisp").
- ShardPhoenix 14y ago
  While I sort-of agree with your point, I think you're being unnecessarily hostile here.
  - batista 14y ago
    I might come of a little hostile yes. I dislike the cult aspect of the whole story, that is. And I think the "ViaWeb/Lisp -> super programming capabilities over mere mortals -> Yahoo millions" thing that started the whole cult worship is both wrong and flawed (e.g statistically insignificant to prove anything).
    - Cushman 14y ago
      I will agree with that the idea that the cult of Lisp started because Viaweb proved that super programming capabilities are better than mere mortals is both wrong and flawed.
    - BrandonM 14y ago
      But why does it anger you so much? Besides, you seem to be ignoring that ViaWeb was built before there were ubiquitous open source libraries for practically everything. My guess is that they basically had to write the whole server/application/persistence/security/payment stack themselves from scratch. Considering that they were able to build it all with a handful (2-4?) of programmers and to beat out competition that had a head start and a much higher head count, I would wager that Lisp had at least a little something to do with it.
      - batista 14y ago
        >But why does it anger you so much? So much? I just made a comment, it's not like I'm running around foaming at the mouth, is it? >Besides, you seem to be ignoring that ViaWeb was built before there were ubiquitous open source libraries for practically everything. My guess is that they basically had to write the whole server/application/persistence/security/payment stack themselves from scratch. Considering that they were able to build it all with a handful (2-4?) of programmers and to beat out competition that had a head start and a much higher head count, I would wager that Lisp had at least a little something to do with it. I agree. But wouldn't something like Smalltalk be equally good for the same purpose? Or Perl?

by Cushman 14y ago

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago

Please add double-lines to your comment so it's readable, thanks! :)

Cushman 14y ago
Hah, sorry. Forgot to read my own writing!

batista 14y ago

>There are a lot of ways to read the situation, but my favorite is that Light Table makes sense purely as a strategic acquisition for YC; there are enough YC companies using the languages Light Table targets that, should it yield magical productivity gains, the knock-on effects from being able to get their developers early access and input would be enormous. If they wind up changing the future of software development, all the better.* This sounds like a really lame conspiracy theory. YC got LT to "yield magical productivity gains" to it's companies? Please. Even if the programmers dropped their editors (Emacs, etc) to adopt LT, the productivity gains would be marginal. And code productivity at that level is not the bottleneck for a startup success either. A decent product people want to use, connections, and chance are far more important. For all the "we used Lisp so we did it faster/better" bragging, Yahoo could almost just as easily buy any other ViaWeb competitor for example, even one using the lamest of methodologies. Downvotes? People believe that using a better editor/IDE will yield "magical productivity gains" for a company? Or that ViaWeb succeeded because it was in Lisp? Well, how about the other 99% of companies, that succeeded based on lame technologies, from Facebook's PHP, to whatever. One company doing something successfully among thousands is as far from a proof as you can get. Post-fact rationalization sounds more like it ("Oh, we got bought. It was because we were ultra-productive programmers yielding Lisp").

ShardPhoenix 14y ago
While I sort-of agree with your point, I think you're being unnecessarily hostile here.
- batista 14y ago
  I might come of a little hostile yes. I dislike the cult aspect of the whole story, that is. And I think the "ViaWeb/Lisp -> super programming capabilities over mere mortals -> Yahoo millions" thing that started the whole cult worship is both wrong and flawed (e.g statistically insignificant to prove anything).
  - Cushman 14y ago
    I will agree with that the idea that the cult of Lisp started because Viaweb proved that super programming capabilities are better than mere mortals is both wrong and flawed.
  - BrandonM 14y ago
    But why does it anger you so much? Besides, you seem to be ignoring that ViaWeb was built before there were ubiquitous open source libraries for practically everything. My guess is that they basically had to write the whole server/application/persistence/security/payment stack themselves from scratch. Considering that they were able to build it all with a handful (2-4?) of programmers and to beat out competition that had a head start and a much higher head count, I would wager that Lisp had at least a little something to do with it.
    - batista 14y ago
      >But why does it anger you so much? So much? I just made a comment, it's not like I'm running around foaming at the mouth, is it? >Besides, you seem to be ignoring that ViaWeb was built before there were ubiquitous open source libraries for practically everything. My guess is that they basically had to write the whole server/application/persistence/security/payment stack themselves from scratch. Considering that they were able to build it all with a handful (2-4?) of programmers and to beat out competition that had a head start and a much higher head count, I would wager that Lisp had at least a little something to do with it. I agree. But wouldn't something like Smalltalk be equally good for the same purpose? Or Perl?