JS is at its core a Lisp/Smalltalk hybrid, and if you write serious JS you know what “currying” is, whether you call it that or not.
LINQ maps onto a lot of the same math that gets used in Haskell.
I hope I haven’t done some elitist gatekeeping bullshit that discourages people from trying new things.
I’d I did: don’t listen to me, keep trying new things!
I think PG's post is kinda shitty and is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to see from someone who's very sure they've got things figured out, but aren't quite as far along their journey as they think they are, while yours is a simple correlational observation that probably has some truth to it (if there's an intellectually-challenging thing that's low-reward, probably the people involved will tend to be pretty smart, since they're just doing it as a hobby or for fun). Yet here we are, in the middle of a fire storm.
I think he's also dispensed exactly the advice you (basically) are, which is that you should choose some nerdy niche language if you want it to be easy to hire smart people cheaply, though I can't find it in a skim of that post and may be imagining it.
I think I used fairly intemperate language because I feel (rightly or wrongly) this dogma that all engineering problems and all engineers are just k-equivalent and am sort of frustrated by that feeling.
If some shit isn’t so hard that it’s inaccessible to me, then why should I work and study and sweat to be able to solve the N-1 hard problem?
Sorry for "saying it out loud", but that's exactly what you did.
This sort of post obviously irks many people. I think the reason is that pros have seen many many dimensions of what "being smarter" means. You can't claim that there is a correlation until you specify on what dimension of 'being smart' you're attempting to correlate against.
Further, it perpetuates this super annoying egotistical myth for a collection of folks: they think that they themselves are much better programmers than everyone around them. When they write crappy code that can't be maintained, it's the team's fault. The team is obviously not up to their level of genius. Etc.
Edit: removed an unnecessary bit for something hopefully more constructive.
I no longer have a horse in the race. I wonder why categorical claims really get the blood moving :)
It wasn’t my intention to imply that I was smart personally, rather that of the crazy effective people I’ve had the privilege of working with, Haskell hackers are wildly over-represented in that group.