Paul just how much impact do you think that Reddit being initially implemented in Lisp had?
I mean, sure, relative numbers of Lisp users might have been pretty small, but the very fact that it was written in Lisp may have gotten fans and detractors to at least hear about the site (probably the hardest thing to do), and then once they checked it out start using it.
So how important do you think that was to initial popularity? Is implementing a site in an obscure yet much-discussed language worth it just for publicity reasons?
I don't think it made that much difference. There are probably 100 people who are such hardcore Lisp fans that they'd become users of any web app written in it, but not 1000.
Nobody is using ourdoings.com because it's written in Scheme. They use it because they're busy with activities that lend themselves to photography (e.g. traveling or raising kids), and they don't have a lot of time to share/organize. Lisp hacking is not a photogenic activity.
If you want to leverage a language for publicity, you need to pick something that hackers in that language would want to do.
I mean, sure, relative numbers of Lisp users might have been pretty small, but the very fact that it was written in Lisp may have gotten fans and detractors to at least hear about the site (probably the hardest thing to do), and then once they checked it out start using it.
So how important do you think that was to initial popularity? Is implementing a site in an obscure yet much-discussed language worth it just for publicity reasons?