So I've read that they wrote it in Lisp at Paul Graham's request or to win favor. Does anyone know if writing your startup code in Lisp still has that benefit?
That myth came from a few posts by a person who was a huge proponent of Lisp, in an era were web (front and backend) development was much easier, and web-related libraries were lacking in all languages (so it wasn't like Lisp's smaller popularity would hurt you there).
It's an example of one.
If they didn't get lucky and Yahoo! bought some other company in the same domain in their place (they already have a few competitors) the whole "Lisp as a secret weapon" would be moot.
Statistically speaking, 99.9% of succesful startups were written not in any Lisp, and 0.1% of them in Lisp. Not the biggest 0.1% either, more towards the bottom, in the context of web company deals during the ramp up to the dot-com bust. Viaweb was sold for $50 million. For context, Yahoo! bought Broadcast.com a year later for 5 billion and doc.com startups of the era routinely raising and burning $50-$100 million for fun - heck, Razorfish (a design consultancy) built websites for clients like Levis, Sony, Mercedes Benz, etc. for $20-$40 million (and that's late-90s era websites, nothing especially fancy).
Of course all that's irrelevant to whether Viaweb was written in Lisp. Which is my point, exactly. What's more, Yahoo! even scrapped all their Lisp code soon after.
Now, writing your startup code in a productive language, that doesn't slow down the development team, allows for easy+quality hires, and so on - even if it's not the best for when you get huge, is a benefit. That hardly requires Lisp.
I think the point that PG was making wasn't that P(lisp|success) > P(blub|success) is what's key but that P(success|lisp) > P(success|blub)
> What's more, Yahoo! even scrapped all their Lisp code soon after.
I'm hardly a PG fanboy, but I have to say this is exactly what's expected in PG's original post on the subject[0]. It's precisely because big companies will only stick to blub languages that Lisp becomes an advantage for a startup.
The point of "Beating the Averages" isn't that you must use Lisp but that small groups of elite hackers can use more powerful tools than larger organizations can't get away with because they generally have lower skilled, only comfortable with blub, programmers.
The reason we don't see many startups following this advice now isn't because it's wrong (necessarily), but because since that essay was written, the vast majority of the startup ecosystem has come to resemble large companies. We've had a pipeline churning out devs for many years now. The ones that are great at leetcode and playing the game go to FAANG, the ones that aren't go to startups. It's not even about where the higher skilled devs are because that hasn't played a factor in most companies success in a long time.
With rare exceptions, startups are no longer created by brilliant hackers looking to change how things are, but by business minded people looking to take advantage of the easy VC money in the last decade. Interviewing at startups used to be exciting, now the vast majority feel like they're run by people who couldn't manage to get a director role at a FAANG.
Perhaps, but that was handwaving from an example of one.
Would Lisp startups dominate if more people did Lisp startups?
I seriously doubt so, but in any case, the examples we see are people not doing Lisp startups and succeeding just fine - with the language used hardly being a serious factor (compared to timing, feature set, user adoption, VC interest, and mere dumb luck).
>Interviewing at startups used to be exciting, now the vast majority feel like they're run by people who couldn't manage to get a director role at a FAANG.
Isn't the latter true for most real hacker types?
What about companies with a technology department that aren’t FAANG or a startup? Isn’t that where most devs go?
For example, one thing we were told when choosing to write in a lisp was that we’d have problems finding developers. It turned out to be true in that we received fewer applications, but compared to the same process with a more mainstream language, I’d say the applicants were on average of higher quality. So by the final step, we were approximately considering the same number of résumés in both cases.
But in the end, the language is not what has made the biggest impact. It’s been other, more universally applicable things, such as team dynamics and communication, clarity of vision and consistency in execution, process and planning, and a ton of other things where the particular language is not a factor.
1) Developers who like Lisp tend to be really smart, well-read, and well-educated.
2) Lisp streamlines these developers' thought processes, allowing them to get more done with less, fast.
For example, the early Naughty Dog games written in GOOL/GOAL take clever advantage of asset data to produce effects close to the very edge of what the PlayStation/PlayStation 2 can do. No feature in these Lisp languages made this possible where C or C++ could not, but working in Lisp enabled the developers to iterate quickly, experiment, and arrive at interesting innovative solutions within the required time frame.
You just described key Lisp features that aren't in C++. It's almost the entire point of using Lisp.
I asked the dev who made the engine why lisp.
"I had a month to build a new scripting engine. Lisp is the easiest to implement in c/c++ or in assembly and I had done it in college. So I made a compiler /emulator in like a week. If I had more time I would have made a dumbed down python with parallelism"
The parallelism was cool because you could have multiple conditions running at once like 5 ai walking 5 simple action loops until one of 3 conditioned collapsed them all into attack mode. Easy to model as threads with joins in this language. Could have been done with other languages but harder to do the memory management.
So not really cause it was a lisp
I can echo this statement with Rust. Same story. Our comparison was Python to Rust. Same app. Big leap, i know.
In all of my career, it’s not those who know who have been good. It’s those who know how to learn new things fast that are good. It’s people who problem solve that make good engineers.
In the inverse. If somebody has a negative reaction to lisp, it’s a sign of a poor engineer.
that said a language can push you to the moon or help you crash faster, team culture and fit will matter more IMO