There's a thread in some of the joelonsoftware discussion forums where Joel argues that pg's use of continuation-style passing and closures to represent web state made it difficult to use the back button and that it was the wrong thing to do. If I recall, pg also replied on that thread defending his decision.
A long time ago I hypothesized that the cause of back
button not working in an early version of Yahoo! Stores
was because the pages of the wizard were implemented as
if they were subroutines, using a feature of Lisp that
Paul Graham advertised somewhere as a benefit. So now
all of a sudden I'm anti-Paul Graham and anti-Lisp and
anti-FP.
I'm sure you didn't intend this, but that's actually a very misleading quote out of context. It reads like he's explaining why he's anti-Paul Gram and anti-Lisp and anti-FP. What he actually means is that people are saying he's those things when he isn't.
Actually, the context has been deleted and by Joel himself. The OP link to the fogcreek page used to have a lively comments section where Joel was very snippy about Lisp and Paul Graham indeed. He was just being snarky, and didn't sound very smart. I emailed him Paul Graham's lengthy explanation of the usability quirk about the Back button and he modified his previous comments - it's always handy to be the guy who wrote the content management system where the comments are hosted - to include my info and sound less snippy, and essentially took credit for what I showed him.
I gather quite a few people remember that discussion, and that's why he's defending myself as being labelled anti-Lisp. He did sound that way, very strongly.
Why are you dredging up a ten-year-old non-controversy?
(Yes, HN is built on the same principle, which is how we end up with links that time-out, but that doesn't suddenly make what Joel thought ten years ago relevant.)
He brought this up on Dev Days too (2009?) and made a jab at the lisp backend not knowing how to handle the back button. It's sort of low to keep hearkening back to the same usability mishap.
Also IIRC a lot of websites behaved this way back then. Hell, some still do today.
