* Lisp: http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html * Beating the averages: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Other notable programmers have mentioned this. I can think of Yegge's article (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...) where he mentions this:
> ...It's dirty laundry that needs airing. The problem: Paul Graham. I mean, the guy's a genius, and I love reading his essays, and his startups are doing great things, etc. etc. You can't fault him. But he's created something of a problem. > Before Paul Graham, Lisp was dying. It really was, and let's not get all sentimental or anything; it's just common sense. A language is always either gaining or losing ground, and Lisp was losing ground all through the 1990s. Then PG came along with his "I'm not talking to you if you're over 26 years old" essays, each a giant slap in our collective face, and everyone sat up and paid attention to him in a hurry. And a TON of people started looking very seriously at Lisp.
In addition, HN itself is written in a dialect of Lisp called Arc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
This is why you can't trust HN as the general opinion among people or even programmers. They are a very specific subset of programmers who are more likely to be interested in things like Lisp.