General talk about software patterns

[Ralph Johnson <johnson AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

Lisp is a wonderful language, and many great things have been done with it.
However, for some reason, fewer people are using it now than used to use it.

> But just to put some real case example of "related things in the real world"
> Paul Graham, btw, made 50 million dollars at Yahoo Stores using these
> ideas...   He patternized Yahoo stores...

Paul Graham built a system and a company, and sold the company to Yahoo.
Yahoo took it over and was successful with it, but eventually rewrote it all
in Java.  This is a typical story.  Why do people take successful systems in
Lisp (or Smalltalk, or ...) and rewrite them in much more boring and less
powerful languages?  We need to understand this if we want to make the world
safe for powerful languages.

-Ralph