[coldtea]

It never had any particular benefit to write your startup code in Lisp.

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't like Lisp's smaller popularity would hurt you there).

It's an example of one.

If they didn't get lucky and Yahoo! bought some other company in the same domain in their place (they already have a few competitors) the whole "Lisp as a secret weapon" would be moot.

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's late-90s era websites, nothing especially fancy).

Of course all that's irrelevant to whether Viaweb was written in Lisp. Which is my point, exactly. What's more, Yahoo! even scrapped all their Lisp code soon after.

Now, writing your startup code in a productive language, that doesn't slow down the development team, allows for easy+quality hires, and so on - even if it's not the best for when you get huge, is a benefit. That hardly requires Lisp.

[PheonixPharts]

> Statistically speaking, 99.9% of succesful startups were written not in any Lisp, and 0.1% of them in Lisp.

I think the point that PG was making wasn't that P(lisp|success) > P(blub|success) is what's key but that P(success|lisp) > P(success|blub)

> What's more, Yahoo! even scrapped all their Lisp code soon after.

I'm hardly a PG fanboy, but I have to say this is exactly what's expected in PG's original post on the subject[0]. It's precisely because big companies will only stick to blub languages that Lisp becomes an advantage for a startup.

The point of "Beating the Averages" isn't that you must use Lisp but that small groups of elite hackers can use more powerful tools than larger organizations can't get away with because they generally have lower skilled, only comfortable with blub, programmers.

The reason we don't see many startups following this advice now isn't because it's wrong (necessarily), but because since that essay was written, the vast majority of the startup ecosystem has come to resemble large companies. We've had a pipeline churning out devs for many years now. The ones that are great at leetcode and playing the game go to FAANG, the ones that aren't go to startups. It's not even about where the higher skilled devs are because that hasn't played a factor in most companies success in a long time.

With rare exceptions, startups are no longer created by brilliant hackers looking to change how things are, but by business minded people looking to take advantage of the easy VC money in the last decade. Interviewing at startups used to be exciting, now the vast majority feel like they're run by people who couldn't manage to get a director role at a FAANG.

0. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

[jocaal]

I think the real reason startups are using blub is something else entirely, tooling. The reason lisp was cool in the early days were because it allows you to easily build abstractions to improve productivity, but these days any language comes with a decent web framework. You also get fancy IDE's and language servers and SDK's from your cloud provider. The productivity a large ecosystem gives you IMO is much larger than what a language can provide.

[coldtea]

>I think the point that PG was making wasn't that P(lisp|success) > P(blub|success) is what's key but that P(success|lisp) > P(success|blub)

Perhaps, but that was handwaving from an example of one.

Would Lisp startups dominate if more people did Lisp startups?

I seriously doubt so, but in any case, the examples we see are people not doing Lisp startups and succeeding just fine - with the language used hardly being a serious factor (compared to timing, feature set, user adoption, VC interest, and mere dumb luck).

>Interviewing at startups used to be exciting, now the vast majority feel like they're run by people who couldn't manage to get a director role at a FAANG.

Isn't the latter true for most real hacker types?

[jcpst]

> We've had a pipeline churning out devs for many years now. The ones that are great at leetcode and playing the game go to FAANG, the ones that aren't go to startups.

What about companies with a technology department that aren’t FAANG or a startup? Isn’t that where most devs go?

[antupis]

I think that difference is that now every mainstream programming language is so good that there is not that much difference outside very specific niches. That was not case in 2003.

[abecedarius]

Lisp-vs-mainstream was just a very different comparison in the 90s versus now. Most of Lisp's advantages have been incorporated into its big competitors. At the time the advantages were nothing to sneer at, even though there were counterpoints then too.