Reddit broke - should have remained on Lisp?

[Tim X]

"Luis M. González" <luismgz at gmail.com> writes:

> Alok wrote:
>> While posting a comment on http://www.reddit.com I got an error page
>> with the following curious statement on it.
>>
>> "reddit broke (sorry)"
>> "looks like we shouldn't have stopped using lisp..."
>>
>> See screenshot at
>> http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1773/1980/1600/reddit-broke.jpg
>>
>> Whether they truly repent not using lisp or otherwise, their site
>> appears to be 3 times slower ...
>>
>> Alok
>
>
> I don't know if this is true or not, but blaming a language for a poor
> development is a little bit ridiculous...
>
Although I'd like to agree with you and the principal is sound,
unfortunately it does not always hold in the real world. In the years
I've been programming, there have certainly been situations in which a
poorly implemented or poorly designed language has made developing
reliable software near impossible.

Admittedly this is not as common as it was in the 80s when you had
lots of companies developing their own "better" languages for certain
domains and there were a lot of 4GLs promising the world, it is still
possible to have a situation in which a development fails because of a
poorly chosen language. 

Actually, I've just remember the introduction to PCL where Peter talks
about his fathers experience with lisp in the 80s. In this example,
choosing lisp saved a development project which was looking very much
like it was going to be a complete failure. If do something like
selecting a different language saves a development project, isn't it
also reasonable to suggest that the converse could be true and that
selecting the wrong language could have a negative impact on
development?
 
Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au