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Comment by wolfgke | Hacker News Reader

> Honestly curious why Lisp has so much admiration and praise on HN.

Paul Graham and Robert Tappan Morris, two of the founders of YCombinator, love Lisp/Scheme. They got rich by selling their company Viaweb to Yahoo. You guessed it: Viaweb was written in LISP and Paul Graham believes that this was their secret weapon:

> http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Also the software that drives Hacker News is written in Arc, a Lisp dialect that was invented by Paul Graham.

So Hacker News and YCombinator are indeed at least historically very attached to Lisp/Scheme.

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Which promptly got rewritten after pg left.

EDIT: From the years being here, and having played with LISP myself, it's a language that appeals to a certain type of programmer, who claim to find it very productive compared to other languages.

And everyone else hates it.

So you pick a LISP language you're severely limiting your hire pool.

>So you pick a LISP language you're severely limiting your hire pool.

I'd rather have 5 very good Lisp programmers than 50 code monkeys.

I'd rather have 5 very good programmers (using ANY language) than 50 code monkeys (using ANY language). The problem with the Lisp programmers is that they very likely would not be able to work as a team.

I think this claim has no base. I've worked with Lisp programmers and there was no special problem doing so.

I might even prefer 5 average lisp programmers to 50 code monkeys.

The whole point of picking Lisp as a language for many people is to have a hiring pool of small but good programmers.

Also Y Combinator is a technique to do recursion on lambda calculus which lisp is built upon.

Haskell (and other functional languages) is also built on the lambda calculus. Lisp isn't special in that regard.

So what? 10000+ companies were successful with software not written in Lisp. Biz success is not decided by the programming language you use.

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