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Historical note: Viaweb was written in lisp, so most of the users had a hard time customizing it (I heard of one book on modifying Viaweb, but have never actually seen it.)

Yahoo eventually re-wrote it in another language.

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Whereas if they wrote it in C++, the average store owner Joe would have a walk in the park with it?

Depending on how heavily metaprogramming is relied on, relatively so

You are mixing up two layers. Viaweb was written in Common Lisp, but the end users used RMTL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTML).

Whether you implement RTML in Python, Unlambda, Common Lisp or Rust doesn't make a difference to the user.

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