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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.