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You should read about MySpace and "Samy is my hero". Or Google vs. AltaVista. Or GeoWorks vs. Microsoft Windows. Or Yahoo Mail and the medireview problem. Or when Danger lost everybody's data. Or THERAC-25. Or Knight Capital's bug.

On the other hand, for many years a lot of Amazon's back office processes were written in Elisp.

With enough thrust you can get a pig to fly but effort can only compensate for bad technical decisions up to a point.




>Elisp

Elisp? Elisp? Are you sure?


I didn't witness it, but Steve Yegge says he did; from https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel:

> Shel wrote Mailman [not the Python mailing list manager, an Amazon-internal application] in C, and Customer Service wrapped it in Lisp. Emacs-Lisp. You don't know what Mailman is. Not unless you're a longtime Amazon employee, probably non-technical, and you've had to make our customers happy. Not indirectly, because some bullshit feature you wrote broke (because it was in C++) and pissed off our customers, so you had to go and fix it to restore happiness. No, I mean directly; i.e., you had to talk to them. Our lovely, illiterate, eloquent, well-meaning, hopeful, confused, helpful, angry, happy customers, the real ones, the ones buying stuff from us, our customers. Then you know Mailman.

> Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it.

> People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them.

> It was truly surreal. I think they may have spiked the eggnog.


AFAIK, mailman was the only thing ever wrapped in this way.

I wrote all the rest of the back-office utilities (at least, the initial versions of them), and I have never come across any indication that they got "wrapped" in anything else (they did, no doubt, evolve and mutate in something utterly different over time).

Yegge's quote is also slightly inaccurate in that mailman, like all early amzn software, was written in C++. Shel and I just chose not use very much of the (rather limited) palette of C++ syntax & semantics.


Aha, the correction is greatly appreciated.

Most days I regret posting to HN. Today is not one of those days.


Well, a proper Emacs module can be set up with menus and a relatively easy interface for everyone.

A good example it's GNUs.




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