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Comment by zandorg | Hacker News Reader

I think Lisp would be one reason TO buy them. Google needs a Lisp team and I imagine they realise this.

Can you expand on why you believe Google needs a Lisp team? I am having trouble coming up with any convincing argument for needing one.

Because it's a language in which you can be incredibly productive. The only downside is speed of execution, but optimisations help.

Why I think Google needs one? Because they don't have one, and considering their financial resources, they can afford it, and because ITA will pay for itself.

1 billion dollars for a developer team who uses certain language? Wouldn't it be cheaper just to hire the team?

Do you think they'll also spend top dollar to "buy teams" that are good at other languages? Kind of a ridiculous concept - surely if the gains of Lisp were actual, Google would just pay their employees to learn and use Lisp.

(also answer to pavs) Well, when Google acquired ReMail, everyone here said "It's a talent acquisition". So why should this be any different - $1b for the world's best Lisp hackers?

Talent acquisitions are usually in the millions, not the billions. If you're paying a billion dollars, you want to get more than talent out of the deal. There are probably cheaper ways for Google to get excellent Lispers.

I think they probably have a couple people that know Lisp... Peter Norvig probably knows some :)

Airline flight scheduling and pricing is harder than lisp.

You think Google doesn't already have people who know Lisp and would love to use it if they were allowed to? :)

Python is fine for Norvig.

Not at all http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

    The conversation went something like this:

    Me:  I'd like to talk to you about something...
    Him: Let me guess - you want to use Smalltalk.
    Me:  Er, no...
    Him: Lisp?
    Me: Right.
    Him:  No way.

    And that was the end of Lisp at Google.

Sounds a bit like how Smalltalk was banished from Viaweb:

http://xach.livejournal.com/146281.html

I believe "him" was Urs Holzle, who built runtimes for Self, Samlltalk and Java (which was later bought by Sun). Urs knows way more about these languages than Gat. His "no way" should be enough for anyone.

OK, but Ron Garrett's no lightweight either: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6f75cfb5a2...

...with Lars Bak.

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