[batista]

1) anecdotal self praise. That a startup (one!) that got acquired used Lisp doesn't prove anything. Many many more succesful startups did not. And its not like it was the most intriguing technologically or acquisition-value wise.

2) "A library for almost anything" (and lot of them abandoned or half done) != multiple libraries for everything and then some.

3) I wouldn't put forward elisp as an example of a good functional language. Actually it's crap. And Emacs is not more powerful that Eclipse or IntelliJ, except if you mean "has lots of hohum plugins and ome good ones".

[greyfade]

> 1) anecdotal self praise. That a startup (one!) that got acquired used Lisp doesn't prove anything. Many many more succesful startups did not. And its not like it was the most intriguing technologically or acquisition-value wise.

That's not the point. The point was that they had a product that they could improve more rapidly than their competitors; a fact that they readily attribute to it being written in Lisp. Just about any other working Lisp programmer probably has a similar story.

And I do not put forward elisp as a "good" language. It is a Lisp, and the success and longevity of Emacs is a testament to its Lisp underpinnings.