See: Paul Graham: Beating the Averages and Y Store now C++ (2003)
A rewritten version (C++ and Perl) just launched in Jan. However,
- The reason they rewrote it was entirely that the current engineers didn’t understand Lisp and were too afraid to learn it.
- 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.
- Even then, they had to drop some features (involving advanced uses of closures).
However the opposite happens as well: Outlyer moved from Python/NodeJS to Erlang.
