If their competitors were writing their applications in C++ or Perl, it probably would have made a noticeable difference to their iteration speed. Writing a web application in C++ (especially in 1995) would not have been too efficient.

I'm sure that they had a good understanding of their customers, but the language had to have made a difference as well. These days, we're writing web apps in languages like JavaScript and Ruby, not C++, so the difference would be a lot less significant.

Knowledge of the customer and programming ability is the most important driver of success.

The idea that LISP was a secret sauce for viaweb does not hold up under scrutiny.

If you have access to lexisnexis to lookup news articles from the era, it’s easy to see that.

Google is known to write a lot of their web apps in Java, which is very similar to C++.