On 'The hundred year language'

Like most of the works from (what I would call) hardcore Lisp fans that we've read over the years I experienced feelings while reading whenever (in this case) Mr.Graham got (again, in my eye) a bit too pushy with the Lisp fandom.

Maybe I'm oversensitive to the Lisp fandom but when Mr.Graham says
"I think you might be able to design the [100 years] core language today. In fact, some might argue that it was already mostly designed in 1958" (So ok Lisp) then says "If present-day programming languages had been available in 1960, would anyone have wanted to use them?" and then "I think the smartest programmers would have had no trouble making the most of present-day languages, if they'd had them [in the 1960's]" I don't think it is unreasonable to see a slight implication that If I'm among the smartest programmers today I should have no trouble 'making the most of Lisp (or the hundred year language). I don't appreciate these kinds of things.

I also felt sad when I read him say that he thinks having minimal axioms is best but then proceeded to be very axiomatic such as when he states that all large organizations always tend to the OO paradigm. I guess being minimal in the axioms is only cool only in programming language design not in general like I was led to think.

Don't get me wrong I actually love Lispy languages, I had a blast with Clojure and one of my life goals right now is to learn Haskell. Still, I find them demeaning and also discouraging. I get scared I'll become a fan like that if/when I do end up learning Haskell or CommonLisp in and out. I don't really want to be that guy. I'll mentiom I'm a big fan of Y-combinator's hacker news so nothing perosnal with Mr.Graham.

I did like and agree with a lot of the essay. I didn't know that awesome tip about buying a house (at 22 I guess I haven't had the need) but I do appreciate it. I also very much agree with the parallelism he establishes between programming languages and mathematics notation and lots of his thoughts about the evolution of programming languages such as how they'll probably have to cover wider ranges of efficiency. I do think that language designers should look long term into the future.