A cult I almost joined (2005)

Lisp programmers don't joke about themselves? "Lots of irritating, superfluous parentheses"? "Lisp programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing"? "Emacs makes a great OS, it just needs a decent text editor"? Has this person ever heard Lisp programmers talk, or does his only exposure to Lisp culture come from the Selected Flames of Erik Naggum?

I agree with the overall sentiment Lisp is somewhat cult-like. However, I find the author's rhetoric exhausting, especially considering it just boils down to: "Lisp has too much programmatic chaos for me and I think it's constituent arbiters are zealots."

edit: clarified I was talking about the author, not Lisp programmers.

>...a guy who explains that lisp is a language for smart people, while everything else is for code monkeys. When I was on the fence between putting too much time into learning lisp and too much time learning python, this tipped me over the fence into python land.

People with poor personalities could latch onto any language. Why do they dedicate themselves to lisp? In spite of any flaws in the community or technology, there is obviously something special present - something potentially educational.

>Do I really want to be on this guy's team?

This sentiment is strange and tribalistic.

One thing that the author brings up is that (at least in 2005) Lisp had a very "roll-your-own" culture in which a programmer was expected to write most of the code they use, which is alien to the workflow of most programmers in the 21st century.

But starting around 2010, Quicklisp (a module system for Common Lisp) began to gain traction, and while it has fewer packages than say, Python, the principle of bringing in modules written by others to avoid reinventing the wheel is pretty much the same these days in Common Lisp as in other languages.

This is the best thing I've read all month and I particularly like that the only negative commenter so far confirms the author's characterization of their humor 100%.