I deduce from this that the fault was not in the language, but in the company, specifically in the resume filter that asks for 3+ years of production Clojure. A programmer who learns languages can learn Clojure for production work. That's better than trying to bring a soaring program back down to earth (or for C++, chaining it to a cart and dragging it into the salt mines).

But don't listen to me, here's Paul Graham from Beating the Averages (Footnote Edition). And ponder this question: why didn't Yahoo just rewrite the templates in C++?

[1] Viaweb at first had two parts: the editor, written in Lisp, which people used to build their sites, and the ordering system, written in C, which handled orders. The first version was mostly Lisp, because the ordering system was small. Later we added two more modules, an image generator written in C, and a back-office manager written mostly in Perl.

In January 2003, Yahoo released a new version of the editor written in C++ and Perl. It's hard to say whether the program is no longer written in Lisp, though, because to translate this program into C++ they literally had to write a Lisp interpreter: the source files of all the page-generating templates are still, as far as I know, Lisp code. (See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.)