This is one of the funniest things I've read in forever. Some of those lines need posters.
"You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis."
I wish I could upvote this about a thousand times.
This describes most (not all, but most) of the technical people I've worked with whom I view as heroes. At one point I thought I wanted to be a systems programmer. Then I recognized that I was incapable of the patience, detail orientation, and insight required to be one.