Ask HN: Why Lisp become so popular?

Paul Graham, one of the founders of YCombinator, researched LISP when he was in grad school. He sold a startup to Yahoo that was based on software he wrote in LISP, he thought LISP was a competitive advantage (although Yahoo rewrote the product in another language!)

Graham wrote his own dialect of LISP called "arc", and I understand the Hacker News software is written in arc.

So HN has a direct line to LISP culturally.