Dan Weinreb comments on Google's acquisition of ITA
danweinreb.org
danweinreb.org
So ITA (possibly) wouldn't choose Common Lisp again. I wonder if he includes other lisps in that. And does he agree with ITA on that choice?
How many companies have purchased companies whose flagship is developed in Lisp only to shutdown or redo all Lisp work? WTF is this pattern? Is there a name for it?
(and that doesn't count the companies that did it to themselves like Amazon)
Lisp was fashionable through sometime in the mid '80s or so, when it was "officially" blamed for the failure of the over-hyped expert systems market. (See a bit of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter#The_fall_of_expert_sy...)
The biggest reason, of course, is what some have called the "de-skilling" of IT. The vast majority of organizations view IT as a cost center, and they (want to) view us as interchangeable cogs; this became critical when IT became so big (say, starting in the '80s). Lisp goes very much against that philosophy; as Dan notes, "Acquirers of companies with Lisp software usually make the big mistake of commanding that it must be rewritten in Java."
That's a language explicitly designed by James Gosling for implementing already fixed/solid designs and it fits very well into the humans as interchangeable cogs mindset (not his fault, except in that C++ wasn't really suited to that mindset and Java fixed the intractable problem with C++ for that (manual memory management)).
PG and the failed C++ re-write of Viaweb might be an example of this, Yahoo is said to be a place that doesn't attempt to hire the best engineers and that alone is very telling.
I don't buy that. There are countless software shops that are obsessed with programmer skill and productivity, in fact live or die by it, and almost none of them choose a lisp.
Even then, in knowledge work you're obviously going to care about skill.
(Sure wish I'd believed a book on this subject (the deskilling of programming) that I read in the '80s; knowing what a recipe for technical failure it is I didn't. Unfortunately all too many suits believe it.)
I've never heard this as a claimed problem for Lisp, and given the extreme plasticity of Lisp code it doesn't make any sense at all (granted, you can write FORTRAN in any language, but...).