No one ever heard of Yahoo! Store? Well apparently between 20-30K merchants did.

And of course, your LISP friend would say the code you showed him was horrible, it's not in LISP. :P

(I'm only half kidding, my very limited experience is that LISP programmers look down on everything not LISP. Maybe just me though. Though I could swear I remember someone in the LISP community calling Perl, "Lisp with Cancer" )

It wasn't heroics either to keep it going, C/C++ programmers are just much easier to come by. Because something isn't popular, doesn't mean it's not useful.

OTHOH it let a handful of people make a robust and stable product quickly. The Editor being LISP, the Manager being C and Perl. I had some involvment with Viaweb/Y! Store. On more than one occasion, if someone called in with a bug, pg would fix it while they were on hold.

FP can be abused, it can also lend itself intuitively to solving certain problems. If your argument is that a language should idiot-proof code by constriction, Perl is probably not the best fit for ya.