Comment by winestock

"I'm always wary of arguments along the lines of 'we weren’t successful because we were too awesome.'"

What do you mean by "we?" Implicit in the Lisp Curse is the distinction between the Lisp language and its users. Furthermore, later in that essay, I wrote:

One result of these secondary and tertiary effects is that, even if Lisp is the most expressive language ever, such that it is theoretically impossible to make a more expressive language, Lispers will still have things to learn from other programming languages. The Smalltalk guys taught everyone -- including Lisp hackers -- a thing or two about object oriented programming. The Clean programming language and the Mozart/Oz combo may have a few surprises of their own.

Note the use of the words "even if" in that first sentence. That means that I'm open to the idea of there being a more expressive programming language than Lisp. Especially after taking a look at languages such as Clean and Mozart/Oz (which I learned about by reading Hacker News). And if such a programming language doesn't exist, then (as I wrote in that paragraph) Lispers would still have to have a measure of humility.

Remember that the essay focuses on expressive power, but no one claims that that is the only thing that matters in a language. I did not imply that much. Paul Graham has noted that libraries are probably more important than the base language, nowadays. I took pains to point out that Lisp hackers aren't innocent. Re-read the section where I compared Lisp hackers being satisfied with Emacs and Smalltalk hackers having stellar development environments.