This site would not exist and none of us would be here had pg not been successful with Viaweb, which utilized Lisp. I think that PG and company were probably bright enough that things would have worked out with other technologies too, but Lisp made them happy and more productive, I guess.
"Did it alarm some potential acquirers that we used Lisp? Some, slightly, but if we hadn't used Lisp, we wouldn't have been able to write the software that made them want to buy us. What seemed like an anomaly to them was in fact cause and effect."
I agree, but not everyone can sell a company to Yahoo! They probably didn't care about re-writing the app in PHP. They did it for del.icio.us too. What about selling to companies which that not so technically competent but would still like to buy your product? It's so much easier to hire Java/PHP/Ruby/Python people compared to Clojure,Erlang,Haskell people.
