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Comment by lelele | Hacker News Reader

Any advanced language worth his salt will allow you to link libraries from other languages. It may require some work, but at least it can be done; whilst you can't expand the capabilities of your programming language of choice as easily.

I think no language is advanced enough to be used alone for everything. Steve Yeggie said that once a time at Amazon the only languages allowed were Lisp and C. It makes sense: an high level language plus a low level one. Those languages which try to encompass too much become too complex and hard to use effectively (think about C++).

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This is true, but there's a lot to be said for native libraries which can be used more naturally. More important for things like frameworks, etc. than algorithms / highly technical code. e.g. using the Python wrapper for OpenCV is fine -- a little bit jenky but it works, and I definitely don't want to write those myself if I'm focusing on a product. On the other hand, would you want to use a wrapper for a web framework written in C? Probably not.

Wow! I never knew that Amazon was a Lisp company. I'd like to know more about their infrastructure setup with Lisp and C.

I don't have any info besides Yeggie saying it.

I read him religiously but I don't remember him even coming close to making such a claim and searching for "yegge amazon lisp" doesn't turn up anything.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

Yegge wrote that in "Tour de Babel". I don't think it is really true tho.

When I started in 1997 (before Yegge) there was lots of C and Perl but no Lisp, at least not in the central repo. There were restrictions on Perl. The DBAs wouldn't let us use it to insert data in the database. Shel didn't care much for Perl. He might have warmed to it a little bit when he discovered it supported closures; I remember him sending a msg to the software alias about it.

Eric Benson had been a principal at Lucid, though I didn't know it at the time. Once he gave a class to the perlhackers on how to write code. The advice, as I recall, was to put "use strict;" at the top of our scripts and to start every function by shifting all the arguments into local variables. Eric Benson wrote the initial version of the "customer who bought this also bought..." code, and he used Perl, not Lisp. I'm sure he thought about the problem in Lisp terms, tho.

http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

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