His response was to go complain about how "ironic" that was on some other well-known deletionist's page, and whine about how he's "martyring" himself for Wikipedia.
In other words: there's basically no reasoning with the guy who's behind this.
At which point (check his history if you care), he wandered over to another user's page to recruit help, saying:
One commenter even suggested I search for references to improve the articles in question, as opposed to nominating them for deletion (the sheer irony).
So, yeah, apparently asking him to channel his energies into something that's one of Wikipedia's main goals is "ironic" as well as "senseless"?
Sticking with my original conclusion that this is not someone who responds well to reason.
Take Factor for example. It has been hosted at several conferences, has an active community of users, and has an academic paper published in ACM.
http://factorcode.org/littledan/dls.pdf
Perhaps what you meant to say is that no citations exist that meet your own apparently arbitrary standards of approval?
Edit:
It appears that it was another individual who recommended wiki/Factor for deletion. I apologize for my inaccurate accusation, but in my opinion that still does not excuse recommending the removal of Nemerle.
> It takes me but a few minutes to figure out whether I am going to nominate an article for deletion. A single hit that looks like it might possibly be a reliable source and I'm outta there.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215437
Reassuring description of the process, there...
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/sscli2005/pachols...
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc...