LISP's syntax is so atrocious that I never understood its popularity. LISP's possibility to introduce higher-order functions was mentioned several times in its defence, but now I come to think of it, that could be done in ALGOL60 as well. My current guess is that LISP's popularity in the USA is related to FORTRAN's shortcomings.
The memo you're quoting[1] is a lot milder about Lisp, but doesn't come across as the ramblings of a "Smug Lisp Weenie" (disclaimer: I'm currently having a lot of fun playing around with Clojure, so I might not be entirely objective).
Source: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD07xx/EW...
The memo you're quoting[1] is a lot milder about Lisp, but doesn't come across as the ramblings of a "Smug Lisp Weenie" (disclaimer: I'm currently having a lot of fun playing around with Clojure, so I might not be entirely objective).
[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...