Re: Y Store now C++

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

   > > (a) The reason they rewrote it was entirely that the 
   > > current engineers didn't understand Lisp and were too
   > > afraid to learn it. 

>   I believe the pointy-headed bosses were the driving force
>   in the port.  When I worked at Yahoo, management were nervous
>   about the software being written in Lisp because they thought
>   it would be hard to find programmers who knew it.  Not so
>   much that they couldn't find any, I think, but that because
>   it was a comparatively rare skill, management would have
>   less leverage over the hackers.   When skills are not a 
>   commodity, employees aren't hot-swappable.

Paul -- your (a) reads very different from this second paragraph. 
You seem to have gone from "programmers are stupid" to "managers are
stupid" -- perhaps you believe it's both.

If you had a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders will you
base your business one one person who can get hit by a truck? I don't
think of this as pointy-headed behavior at all. Perhaps I should just
shut up about these sorts of reality issues -- it seems this list has
ways to go before it grows up. :)