We have been discussing costs recently, so I wonder whether maintaining a Lisp interpreter written in C++ is cheaper than sending new engineers to study Lisp.

[Lambda Web Log]

Funny, I mentioned the Paul Graham article cited above to a friend at lunch yesterday. John Wiseman notes that Paul has already responded:

Paul Graham writes:

I should mention that they actually have just done this. A rewritten version (C++ and Perl) just launched in Jan. However,

(a) The reason they rewrote it was entirely that the current engineers didn't understand Lisp and were too afraid to learn it.

(b) The resulting program is a new world's record case of Greenspun's Tenth Rule. The Yahoo Store Editor called compile at runtime on s-expressions made on the fly. To translate this into C++ they literally had to write a Lisp interpreter.

(c) Even then, they had to drop some features (involving advanced uses of closures

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp
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