Paul Graham's Viaweb was rewritten in C++ and Perl after the aquisition by Yahoo. I can imagine that this was easier to deal with for a large team than the original implementation in Lisp.
That's not unusual, historically some software had prototypes in Lisp. Some managed to get into production. Some even proved very hard to replace.
But that was at a time when more people learned Lisp, there was less choice in tools and the eco-systems were smaller. In the 70s/80s one could buy ten years into the future with the right hardware/software and government/military was financing.
Take for example the Connection Machine CM 1, an early massive-parallel computer with 2^16 processors. It was initially developed largely for and with Lisp. You could program it in *Lisp from a Lisp Machine - one of the most expensive co-processors. Fortran and C was added then for certain commercial users. Very expensive stuff and at least ten years ahead.
>I can imagine that this was easier to deal with for a large team than the original implementation in Lisp
You can bet this was simply due to lack of Lisp developers at Yahoo. And I can bet that the Lisp code was easier to read.
I once delivered a sophisticated pricing modeler to a financial institution, in Python, done mostly in functional style. Code well documented and commented, and easy to understand. And Python is one of the easiest languages to learn.
The customer's IT deparment insisted on a complete rewrite to Java, because that's what their developers knew.
