If you start a startup, don’t design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow. And if you don’t, no one will care how comfortingly orthodox your technology choices were.
This is a great read: I don’t know all that much about LISP, but this article isn’t really about LISP. It’s about making the right choice for the problem at hand.
The details on how LISP came into the world are interesting — yet another case of the world catching up with an inspired idea — but the discussion about tools in a more general sense was refreshing.