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?

>>38 you know, pointing out a program initially developed in 1982 when Lisp was all the rage is more of an example of software inertia.

>>41

Lisp lacks modern tools for developing GUI.

Can't some superprogrammer throw together a bunch of macros and higher-order functions to solve this problem?

I see, lisp weenies have mastered the art of non-terminating recursion. "Why aren't there any useful programs written in Lisp?" -- "Oh, you see, it's just because we don't have such useful programs as GUI toolkits. Quite simple really". Lemme guess, you don't have nice GUI toolkits because nobody bothered to write a good FFI? And no FFI because I don't know some other prerequisite software artifact is missing?