Re: Y Store now C++

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Paul Graham wrote:

>A friend of mine (who's probably on this list, actually)
>went to interview there in about 2000.  He said they told
>him they didn't need Lisp hackers, because they were going
>to port the Store Editor to C++.  Why?  Because they didn't
>think they'd be able to find Lisp hackers.
>
Yes, this is the flip side of the network-effect, the negative feedback 
loop.
Languages are a winner-take-all (of course actually I mean "a few winners
take most") thing because of the network effects. And in light of the state
of Lisp these days, I expect there are fewer and fewer people getting Lisp
experience. I don't know, perhaps Gnu Emacs and Autocad are generating
some trained Lispers, and a few universities, although to stretch the 
net that
far involves talking about more and more different dialects.

One has to hope that these managers are good enough to make a wise
decision about the costs of using a non-standard language versus the
benefits, e.g. whether the features that depends on closures is something
whose absence will really hurt their business, or whether it's just a 
favorite
of a few elite users, or what (I know nothing about it). And they may, as
you seem to imply, be judging those tradeoffs quantitatively wrongly.  But
it does sound plausible that they are in such a tradeoff situation and need
to consider what to do about it.