The third worry of the pointy-haired boss, the difficulty of hiring programmers, I think is a red herring. How many hackers do you need to hire, after all? Surely by now we all know that software is best developed by teams of less than ten people. And you shouldn’t have trouble hiring hackers on that scale for any language anyone has ever heard of. If you can’t find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software. In fact, choosing a more powerful language probably decreases the size of the team you need, because (a) if you use a more powerful
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