One thing that people forgot to mention is that Paul Graham was a Lisp expert before he started Viaweb - he had already written _On_Lisp_ which is still considered as one of the references to learn Common Lisp - and probably Robert Morris wasn't a bad lisper as well. They most likely were much better programmers than their competitors or Yahoo's median employee, so while Lisp may have been a competitive advantage for them, it wasn't the one that gave them the strongest edge. We don't have the data of how Lisp experts fare against equally strong C++ (or some other language) - although it may be that Lisp magnifies programmer's strength.
If we take Paul’s “The Python Paradox” essay, and turn its conclusions up to eleven, we might end up with this extreme perspective:
Perhaps great programmers are great in any language, and a company employing great programmer will have great results in any language, it’s the programmers that are the competitive advantage for a startup.
But although they’d be great in any language, they have taste, and prefer to work in some languages regardless of whether that is a competitive advantage or not. And therefore, they prefer jobs and startups with languages that match their taste.
And taking that a step forward, these mythical great programmers might prefer working with other people they perceive have taste, so they tend to clump together, and they see the language choice as a kind of signal of what kind of colleagues they will have working for a particular company.
If all this handwaving has merit, it could be that choosing to do your startup in Lisp when Paul started ViaWeb was’t 100% about having a competitive advantage from Lisp itself, it was having a competitive advantage from having Paul and Robert, and anybody else they hired.
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With larger companies, they will never say it, but sometimes they don’t want these “great programmers,” with their taste and their salary demands, and their code that causes an army of middle-of-the-road workmanlike programmers to stare thoughtfully for long periods of time working out how it does what it does.
Even if they end up being more productive, perhaps they end up being less predictable, because a smaller team of better programmers is more vulnerable to poaching as the company goes from developing the next big thing to an endless march of adding small enterprisey features. Even if you write in Scala, Haskell, Lisp, or Clojure, when the work becomes maintaining Yahoo... Maybe you don’t want people who relish a challenge, because they’ll quit.
So you want to anti-signal, by rewriting it all in a workmanlike language, so you get workmanlike people. And if it takes touch longer or costs a bit more overall, it’s predictable because the people are more fungible. They’re easier to replace.
So it could very well be that when you’re launching a startup, you want to go out on a limb and choose the language based on the kind of people you want to hire for a startup.
And when you mature, you might rewrite it in another language based on the kind of people you want to hire for a mature company.
And both choices might be right for their times. And neither might actually have anything to do with the “power” or “expressiveness” or “abstraction” of the language itself.
They will say it. I worked for a startup acquired by Yahoo. I was hired by the founders, but then they all left and I was kind of stranded. Anyway I tried to make a go of it, and proposed how we were going to hire some new great people, and my manager expressed confusion about why I wanted great people.
In his view, if you get great people to do not-so-great jobs, you'll end up overpaying and then they will just leave. For him it was obvious that not all jobs are going to be great. Most of them will kind of suck.
It was 180° away from how I thought, which is the standard "only hire A players" script. But then I realized it did make a kind of sense. Startups and small companies that win have geniuses doing everything, including very unglamorous work. Often they have great solutions which work okay for them, but are incomprehensible to others. (Example: Paul Graham's Yahoo Store builder in Lisp).
Such people are compensated with maybe stock options, but more importantly, with freedom. That wasn't really on offer at a big company. So we had to look for average people to do average things at an average rate, and usually it would be multiple people to do the job that one brilliant person would have taken on.
The vast majority of companies don't need these great/gifted programmers, they need the workmanlike people who will suffer the constantly changing requirements and priorities, and lack of product management, or even product definition.
Interesting. But what if it's both? Or maybe there's an interaction (expanding on "taste")?
That is, some languages are more expressive and/or powerful than others. Your great programmers will tend to gravitate towards these languages because they're able to spot and leverage their inherent advantages.
Conversely, other programmers will appreciate other qualities in languages, which may or may not overlap or interact with expressiveness etc. - e.g. ease (read: familiarity), rich ecosystem (read: lots of libraries and stackoverflow posts).
You can write any abstraction in any language (more or less). But working in some languages you're less likely to encounter code written by people who realize that.
But, great writing/analysis like this about two levels higher than the HN hivemind can comprehend. X = Y (lisp = productive), sure. But X = Y until Z then maybe Q = F is too nuanced for mass understanding around here. If it can't fit into a pmarca simultaneously smug and condescending tweet, nobody will believe you these days.
If they're such great programmers, don't you think they would also be really good at understanding what tools give them a competitive advantage? ;) "...it may be that Lisp magnifies programmers' strength," doesn't seem fair in this light.
