Let’s see now. Paul Graham wrote viaweb in Lisp and claims it was a competitive advantage for a startup.<p>What is his track record with startup(s)? Do we just count N=1? Or do we include what YCombinator has accomplished?<p>Now let’s look at what Yahoo has accomplished as a BigCo.<p>Under the circumstances, would you bet that Paul was right about Lisp, Yahoo about C++, neither, or both?<p>I’d go with Paul being right about Lisp, and Yahoo, well... I’d call that N=1 at best. Clearly they started from a “We already have hordes of C++ programmers” point of view, and a “We apply hordes or programmers to every problem” point of view.<p>It might be the only point of view for them. It could very well be that there were hundreds of Lisp programmers available, but none might have wanted to work for Yahoo under any circumstances. Your mileage may well differ, based on the overlap in the venn diagram of language, culture, and problem set.