The Lisp Paradox

Inferior tools allow less intelligent people to create what those with greater intelligence are unable to create with Lisp.

What does this paradox mean?

Are people who choose to use Lisp actually less intelligent than people who use other languages? Is Lisp actually inferior to and less productive than these other languages? Do the few people who are able to accomplish something in Lisp actually choose it for bragging rights, the way handicaps are used in sports?

Why do people put assembly language and Lisp in the same category of difficult languages? Shouldn't the high productivity of Lisp make it one of the easy languages, like Visual Basic, Python, PHP, and JavaScript? Why is it considered a difficult accomplishment to create something useful in Lisp?

>>9
I was referring to what prevents Lisp from becoming popular, not its properties as a language. You very well know that normies prefer syntactic sugar over metaprogramming. The spec has nothing to do with the implementation. The user doesn't care about the spec. What the user sees is a copious amount of crude, undocumented, and redundant implementations. The last significant effort to make a mainline Lisp was Common Lisp, and that has failed miserably. Lisp has never been tried.

>>14
Most "normies" are copy/paste programmers. They're the equivalent of burger flippers of the tech world. They're not in it for any sort of love of computing, they're there because they feel it's a solid way to make money. They learn the minimum required, and go home after work to do non-programming things. They're also foreigners who see an easy meal ticket to the USA or a more cushy desk job in their local area instead of grinding out manual labor.

Most applicable to this conversation, they will never seek anything out than what's currently tasked to them, or where it looks the most job openings are going. They will always be clinging to the bottom rung of computing. Given that corporate hiring practices reward lowest level fungible boot lickers, this will drive popularity at large.

So the "common", "normie", "average" developer has no bearing on actually driving computer languages forward to better things, nor do the language designers interested in targeting that market.

This also has nothing to do with Lisp in particular. Look at Prolog, Haskell, OCaml, etc, and it's the same story. If as a developer you want to go above and beyond what the basic tools offer, you need to leave the mainstream.