This whole post is complete nonsense.<p>Taking two examples of applications written in Lisp and trying to shoehorn a premise to it is ridiculous. Lisp/PHP/Perl/Ruby/Java are all tools. Anyone who tells you that one house is better than another because it was built with a different type of hammer would (and should) be laughed at.<p>Take this quote and substitute Ruby/Rails or Python/Django or even Java/Spring would give you the same answer and even have a larger base of developers to draw from.<p>"Our hypothesis was that if we wrote our software in Lisp, we'd be able to get features done faster than our competitors, and also to do things in our software that they couldn't do. And because Lisp was so high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. If this were so, we could offer a better product for less money, and still make a profit. We would end up getting all the users, and our competitors would get none, and eventually go out of business."<p>
I think Lisp is simply the right choice for great applications, whether entrepreneur driven or otherwise. For Corporations, if the managers don't understand the value of Lisp, they will opt for different solutions, even if those solutions destroy the value that Lisp offered. Perhaps the only barrier to wider Lisp adoption is an education barrier?
Very cool post. I don't think this is limited to Lisp though. I bet that if a big company acquired a company whose product was written in Python/Ruby/etc then they'd consider rewriting into C# or Java. And they'd have the same issues that Yahoo and Sony had, as expressed in this article.<p>
With all due respect to the Sony and Yahoo engineers/managers I wonder if the shortcomings of the reimplemenations have less to do with the choice of programming language and more to do with the characterestics of people doing the work. I have a suspicion that the "Lisp startups" of the past tended to be composed of particularly intelligent people.
I'd say, XP (extreme programming) is for Entrepreneurs.
Not only for coders, for everyone that needs speed and quality that are variables on opposite sides of the equation.