The Hacker News website runs on Lisp. How many jobs do you see on the market that ask for Lisp? And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.
In other words, HN does not have the problem that you are going to have if you use an unpopular language for your project.
If you choose LISP for your not-HN project, then you have a problem. The chances are very slim of finding any experienced LISP devs who are also in your salary range, within commute distance, want to work on your project, are a good fit for the team, etc.
You're probably going to have to hire a dev who is a good match on all those other things and train them up on LISP. Unless they've had experience with other functional languages (not that unusual, but not common either) then they're going to have to learn an entire new paradigm. All of which means that they'll spend the first six months going slow while they learn, and needing support from the rest of the team.
And you'll need to convince them to join you (probably by paying them more money) because if they spend a few years on your project learning LISP, they probably won't be able to use those skills for their next gig, and their current skills in a popular language will go out of date.
LISP is a great language, and if used well it will probably give you an advantage over the competition using other, more mundane, languages. But is that going to be enough of an advantage to counteract your slower onboarding, higher salaries, and greater recruitment workload?
It's a list of articles and comments. It would take like 3 pages from W3Schools to build this thing.
Firstly, because this site happily handles the amount of traffic that puts many hobbyist sites that happen to get on its front page into a hug of death; so its developers must have done something right on the backend that is probably above the web programming 101 level.
But secondly, because this was precisely my point. One does not need a super popular front-end framework to make an awesome web product, and the HackerNews site is a testament to that.
You mean the message board? The website that has a grand total of 2 functions: post and comment?
> And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing!
It's 2 colors and text. That's it.
> ! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.
It's A MESSAGE BOARD. A. MESSAGE. BOARD.
Have you seen how many blog or portfolio sites people build with react? Sometimes even adding nextjs into the mix? Blogs!
