April Fools! We aren’t switching to Lisp (as much as we love the language). We couldn’t resist having a bit of fun.
Over the past few months we’ve had many architectural discussions about the future of database technology. It quickly became apparent to us that C++, the language we used to develop RethinkDB, is not sufficiently expressive to build the next-generation database product. We realized that in order to design the database system of the future, we need to use a programming language of the future as well.
We did a quick survey of programming languages and eventually narrowed down our choices to Erlang, Haskell, and Common Lisp. Two years ago, Damien Katz of CouchDB laid out the reasons why Erlang is a poor choice for database products. Many of his arguments resonated with us, and we made a wise decision not to …
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