A Matter of Perspective

"Paul Graham has been a dinosaur for a long time and his disturbing elitist stance ('if you don't know Lisp, you're an idiot') oozes from every paragraph of every single programming essay he has ever authored."
— cedric, The language of interviews

Mostly, I think, Paul Graham likes to write about how amazingly wonderful Lisp is and how much Perl and C and Algol all suck. This is great if you're a Lisp hacker, but the fact of the matter is that only a small handful of people will hire you to write Lisp for them. Most companies are looking for C and C++ and Perl and Python, not because these languages are better but because they are more popular. Paul Graham may push the syntactic merits of Lisp, but putting "I know Lisp" on your resume is only going to make you look good to Paul Graham. The rest of the world has other problems to worry about, and your expertise in a particular academic language with minimal real-world deployment is not among them.