I am sure some HR department somewhere has quantified this. If x Lisp programmers can do the work of y Blub programmers where x << y, and the difficulty of hiring one Blub programmer is p, and the salary of a Blub programmer s, what value of z in (pz, sz)makes it worthwhile changing languages?
The last company I worked for did exactly the same thing. Every major release, would would provide a detailed set of instructions, the code, the exact kit list, etc to run up our app and give it to the auditors. Not sure how much use this actually was; our customers already had running systems, and the knowledge of the problem domain was what they were paying us for, not that we were really good at typing into Emacs. And it took us who knew the codebase well 6-12 months to get a programmer to the point at which they could be truly useful with it. But at least, if it had all gone hatstand, someone might have had a fighting chance. Or one of our customers could have just hired us directly and we'd have kept working on it ;-)
The last company I worked for did exactly the same thing. Every major release, would would provide a detailed set of instructions, the code, the exact kit list, etc to run up our app and give it to the auditors. Not sure how much use this actually was; our customers already had running systems, and the knowledge of the problem domain was what they were paying us for, not that we were really good at typing into Emacs. And it took us who knew the codebase well 6-12 months to get a programmer to the point at which they could be truly useful with it. But at least, if it had all gone hatstand, someone might have had a fighting chance. Or one of our customers could have just hired us directly and we'd have kept working on it ;-)