"We chose Lisp. For one thing, it was obvious that rapid development would be important in this market. We were all starting from scratch, so a company that could get new features done before its competitors would have a big advantage. We knew Lisp was a really good language for writing software quickly. [..] And because Lisp was so high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. [..] with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release." - http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
It was the advantages of using Lisp which gave them the ability to create the right product at the right time, instead of the right product too late, or dreams of the right product, too expensive to hire the team to build it.
The claim isn't really that Haskell might be a success and F# a failure, but only that if you can take advantages of more powerful languages power, you gain some advantages over companies which use less powerful languages - but not a guaranteed make or break difference, just another bit of help.
Given that he's gone from successful founder to successful investor mentoring several thriving startups, your claim that he can't "have much clue how the industry works" feels hollow.
Or maybe, just maybe, they know a little bit more about the pros and cons of using a mainstream language to ship a product in terms of staffing and tooling and they decided that Lisp just didn't clear that bar.
Or maybe, just maybe, the guy who wrote it and was there when it was rewritten knows more accurately what happened than you do. It isn't condescending if it's true.
> It was the advantages of using Lisp which gave them the ability to create the right product at the right time
Obviously, because they used Lisp, they were able to produce the product at time t, and any other language would have produced it at a different time t'.
I claim that they had no idea that t was better than t'. Nobody can.
"We chose Lisp. For one thing, it was obvious that rapid development would be important in this market. We were all starting from scratch, so a company that could get new features done before its competitors would have a big advantage. We knew Lisp was a really good language for writing software quickly. [..] And because Lisp was so high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. [..] with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release." - http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
It was the advantages of using Lisp which gave them the ability to create the right product at the right time, instead of the right product too late, or dreams of the right product, too expensive to hire the team to build it.
The claim isn't really that Haskell might be a success and F# a failure, but only that if you can take advantages of more powerful languages power, you gain some advantages over companies which use less powerful languages - but not a guaranteed make or break difference, just another bit of help.
Given that he's gone from successful founder to successful investor mentoring several thriving startups, your claim that he can't "have much clue how the industry works" feels hollow.
Or maybe, just maybe, they know a little bit more about the pros and cons of using a mainstream language to ship a product in terms of staffing and tooling and they decided that Lisp just didn't clear that bar.
Or maybe, just maybe, the guy who wrote it and was there when it was rewritten knows more accurately what happened than you do. It isn't condescending if it's true.