<story><title>Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp</title><url>https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mchaver</author><text>So I&amp;#x27;ve read that they wrote it in Lisp at Paul Graham&amp;#x27;s request or to win favor. Does anyone know if writing your startup code in Lisp still has that benefit?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>It never had any particular benefit to write your startup code in Lisp.&lt;p&gt;That myth came from a few posts by a person who was a huge proponent of Lisp, in an era were web (front and backend) development was much easier, and web-related libraries were lacking in all languages (so it wasn&amp;#x27;t like Lisp&amp;#x27;s smaller popularity would hurt you there).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an example of one.&lt;p&gt;If they didn&amp;#x27;t get lucky and Yahoo! bought some other company in the same domain in their place (they already have a few competitors) the whole &amp;quot;Lisp as a secret weapon&amp;quot; would be moot.&lt;p&gt;Statistically speaking, 99.9% of succesful startups were written not in any Lisp, and 0.1% of them in Lisp. Not the biggest 0.1% either, more towards the bottom, in the context of web company deals during the ramp up to the dot-com bust. Viaweb was sold for $50 million. For context, Yahoo! bought Broadcast.com a year later for 5 billion and doc.com startups of the era routinely raising and burning $50-$100 million for fun - heck, Razorfish (a design consultancy) built websites for clients like Levis, Sony, Mercedes Benz, etc. for $20-$40 million (and that&amp;#x27;s late-90s era websites, nothing especially fancy).&lt;p&gt;Of course all that&amp;#x27;s irrelevant to whether Viaweb was written in Lisp. Which is my point, exactly. What&amp;#x27;s more, Yahoo! even scrapped all their Lisp code soon after.&lt;p&gt;Now, writing your startup code in a productive language, that doesn&amp;#x27;t slow down the development team, allows for easy+quality hires, and so on - even if it&amp;#x27;s not the best for when you get huge, is a benefit. That hardly requires Lisp.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp</title><url>https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mchaver</author><text>So I&amp;#x27;ve read that they wrote it in Lisp at Paul Graham&amp;#x27;s request or to win favor. Does anyone know if writing your startup code in Lisp still has that benefit?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philwelch</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s probably not the way you&amp;#x27;re making it sound. This was in the early early days of YC, when there were like eight companies per batch, and at the peak of PG&amp;#x27;s influence as an online essayist. He wrote a lot about the benefits of Lisp and how Lisp was a competitive advantage for Viaweb. So it was probably less a case of trying to win favor with a seed investor and more a case of actually being convinced it was a good business decision.</text></comment>