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&#x27;t a bad lisper as well. They most likely were much better programmers than their competitors or Yahoo&#x27;s median employee, so while Lisp may have been a competitive advantage for them, it wasn&#x27;t the one that gave them the strongest edge. We don&#x27;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&#x27;s strength.