>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.
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.