BIG successes of Lisp (was ...)

[Peter Seibel]

gat at jpl.nasa.gov (Erann Gat) writes:

> In article <7xvfqs66v6.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>, Paul Rubin
> <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> 
> > The Yahoo Store software was written by some small company
> 
> Viaweb
> 
> > that sold the business to some other company
> 
> Yahoo (obviously).
> 
> > that didn't want to develop in Lisp, I thought.
> 
> That's right.  Yahoo ultimately reimplemented Yahoo Store in C++.

Of course to do so, they had to--according to Paul Graham--implement a
Lisp interpreter in C++! And they had to leave out some features that
depended on closures. So folks who are running the old Lisp version
may never "upgrade" to the new version since it would mean a
functional regression. Graham's messages on the topic to the ll1 list
are at:

  <http://www.ai.mit.edu/~gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg02380.html>
  <http://www.ai.mit.edu/~gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg02367.html>

-Peter

-- 
Peter Seibel                                      peter at javamonkey.com

         Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp