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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I had a backup plan at the time. I suppose I would have gone back to consulting and writing books. Maybe after a while I would have tried to start another company. That would have been hard, though, because if Viaweb hadn't worked out it would have been hard to talk Robert Morris into trying again.

I was pretty excited about Web apps, which were a new thing then. (We planned eventually to make a whole suite of them; Viaweb Store was just the first.) So I probably would have worked on those in some way. Maybe I would have written some sort of general platform for building them, and/or written a book about that topic.

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Assuming the market hadn't changed, and you still had a big market for something like Viaweb, would you still use the same technology stack? Would you still use CLisp, or Clozure/SBCL/ABCL?

Are you asking what I'd use if I were building Viaweb today? The answer to that is probably Arc, though that says more about me than about currently available technologies.

Would you recommend Arc to modern startups in general?

No, I don't think so, not in its current state.

Are there any Lisps you would recommend (other than Clojure)? (Or languages?)

Clojure is probably the best bet. I don't know much about it but lots of people seem to use it, and any decent Lisp that lots of people use is probably a good bet.

Why not? Have you used a language other than Arc to write a web app recently?

If writing web apps in other languages isn't still painful where have other languages/frameworks caught up?

It's still missing some things that most people take for granted.

I've kept an eye on Arc for years, with my 100-year language glasses on. How do you feel about Arc as the 100-year language as described in your essay? It's been 9 years since the essay; any plans for a followup, or do you feel that it's held up over time?

I don't get to work on it much now. I hope there is little in it that wouldn't be in the 100 year language. But there is also little in it.

You mean Go, right?

Why would have been difficult to convince Robert to try again?

Because he didn't even want to do it the first time.

Sorry for going off in a tangent but PG, would you consider doing an AMA on reddit. I've seen two posts in last week with the sole purpose of asking you a question. Seems like the community wants an interaction with you. If you've already done it, I couldn't find it.

Seems like this site is a pretty good way of interacting with him.

There is a meaningful subset of HN'ers who have fairly direct access to PG and the other YC partners - the current class and alumni of Y-Combinator. For the rest of us, PG's essays cover a lot of his background as does his book Hackers and Painters.

The format of Ask PG seems to work pretty well. A mix of technical questions regarding YC applications, changes to HN, and interesting business questions tend to get deeper answers than is common within the limits of AMA.

What type of consulting work did you do before Viaweb?

I used to consult for a company called Interleaf, which was one of the few places that used Lisp at the time.

I used interleaf publisher for my part time job in university. I remember the fonts looked nice on our 20 inch displays.

Maybe I would have written some sort of general platform for building them

There's still time for that. The current solutions leave much to be desired (although they're slowly moving in the right direction).

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