Right, their success was not purely about the language, I'm just saying it helped (rather, he said it helped). This is drawn from my recollection of reading an article pg wrote. I could find the article if anyone is interested (it is an article about how great lisp is, not specifically the history of ViaWeb, I think).

I agree that some people take the choice of language and architecture a little to seriously. Of course you can start a blockbuster business on PHP and MySQL - people prove that frequently!