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?

>>18

Because the companies creating & marketing such things want bulk, cheap workers.

Let's limit our discussion to Free™/Open Sores Software written by genius programmers in their free time/wanting to scratch an itch/without any supervision after they achieved financial independence (like Linus, only Lispers), including but not limited to Software produced by tenured genius programmers working at universities.

We can limit our discussion to that without loss of generality because there's a metric shitton of such software, covering most of one's needs when conjuring the spirits of the computer. Still, there's surprisingly little software written in the supposedly superior languages.

>>20

Because operating systems were written in shit languages in the 1960s, and the same interfaces and assumptions remain today, causing the default supported language to be portable assembler.

Surely a really powerful language would allow a genius programmer to easily wrap the underlying interfaces in superior abstractions? Which of said interfaces do you find intrinsically not wrappable, with particular examples?