Comment by iLemming

That's the proper way of maintaining the elitist status and gatekeeping the community only "for true believers". "Looky here you muggles - yep, Lisp is unreadable as shit. Don't you even think of trying..."

Jokes aside, I feel so raddled every single time I see some Lisp-mentioning post here on HN or Reddit, where inevitably someone comes to complain how "unreadable this Lisp thing is". Not you guys, this color scheme really is some "Christmas Night in a nuthouse"; I'm just unpacking my emotional shit all over, without addressing anyone specifically.

"Lisp is unreadable"... pffft. Geez, what the fuck does that even supposed to mean? Are they programmers or fucking toddlers dealing with an alphabet soup? It's as if linguists complained about semitic languages being "unpronounceable" on some specialized forums. Seriously, can you imagine, someone logs onto a professional forum of linguists and starts berating Arabic or Hebrew, saying shit like "I've been interpreting professionally since I was nine; I am fluent in twelve different languages, but this Arabic stuff, I gotta tell you... is pure bullshit. No money in the world would make me learn or even try using it..."

How can anyone still identify as a programmer with a stance "this programming language is unreadable"? I can understand if that's been said about a PL that someone just made or some ancient thing that very few still use, but how can anyone just dismiss a 65-year-old idea that is still being actively used and for which there's no good replacement?