Now, they are "wonks" for knowing a slightly different (and demonstrably effective) style of programming.
Now that there are millions of programmers. Programming shifted from a fine art to a pop art, to crib something from Alan Kay.
The rest of the crowd is trying to ship code, in the toolset they have some facility with. That toolset has to be available, easily digestible, hopefully targeted at their problem space.
In bioinformatics knowing about, say, functional programming and parallel algorithms could be really useful where data coming out of sequencers is growing faster than Moore's law can keep up, if you want to scale across many cores as efficiently as possible.
Or graph theory, or... any number of useful techniques waiting for an application.
I've had a number of fun conversations discussing and demonstrating Scheme with novice and 'rank-and-file Java/C#' types. The ones who find programming languages fun in themselves are the sort of people who light right up when they're introduced to something like Scheme. That's really all it takes is just a bit of passion and curiosity to make the leap.
In my experience, professional folks I've spoken to have either never heard of Lisp or have associated it with antiquity. You'd be very surprised who'd appreciate being shown new ways of doing things.
When you say things like this, part of me hears you saying, "I have not invested time learning this skillset. However, people argue I should. So I have decided said people are 'wonks,' and therefore I can safely dismiss them." Basically anyone with any differentiation from your skillset falls into that definition.