The whole "web developers can't be talented, passionate, real programmers" narrative is very myopic, tired, and just down right flawed. "Real programmer" machismo, in general, has no place on HN or any community that thrives to be productive and constructive.
You misunderstood me. Of course there's plenty of good web developers. It's just that, in my opinion, the average programming language is less elegant than Lisp, and the average programmer is less passionate than the average Lisper.
This says nothing about individual programmers - there's just a lot of web developers (that's why I picked PHP as an example, because in my mind it's the standard example of a "mainstream language"), and many of them aren't particularly passionate about programming, it's just a job to them (which is, as I tried to point out, perfectly OK!). People who know Lisp, on the other hand, are almost exclusively passionate about programming, because there's no real reason to learn Lisp if you're not - it's not known to be particularly employable.
I never tried to make a value judgement of web developers as a group, it was just a matter of statistics. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.
Your argument has merit, disregard the dissenters, just noise.
The same is true for other great languages. In my view, Erlang, FORTH, Smalltalk. I've yet to meet anyone well-versed in these that didn't turn out to be a good programmer. Moreover, this process is additive. I've met a few people over the years who are well-versed in subsets of the languages I mentioned, that turned out to be masters of the craft and helped me improve tremendously either through them commenting on my work, or me examining their output and their problem-solving approach. If I had one word to describe these persons, it'd be Artists.
In close to 20 years in this domain, I've yet to meet a single person whose primary expertise lies in {C, C++, Javascript, PHP, Java, C#, Python, Ruby}, that has triggered paradigm shifts in me that led to personal growth or re-evaluating programming. If I had one word to describe these persons, it'd be laborers. Of course the second group is also far larger than the first, and includes all the hacks [1], primadonnas [2] and mediocrats [3] one would expect.
Now, i am no web programmer, but I read that differently. Or at least I saw another truth in it compared to what theauthor meant. To me it seems like web programming is in many ways a "solved problem". Most of the tools for doing a large part of what is web development is already there, and there is a big living ecosystem for web developers.
Lisp is not a part of that, and I doubt it would bring much even if it was. Learning lisp for someone that is fluent in some.pf the big frameworks seems to me like another way of being able to do less with more code and less neat abstractions.
Sure, Lisp has some really cool things, and in many ways it is great for building abstractions in with all the macro facilities, but the path to the same ecosystem (to me) looks too long and too impossible.
Why not? If programming were poorly paid scut work, that would be true. But since it's a very highly compensated ticket to the middle class---surely many will do it without love.
Look at the games industry: worse pay, worse hours---those people must love their vocation.
That's not the question. The question is: why? Why is programming such a special field of endeavor that those who approach it may only virtuously do so by vocation, rather than profession? The only other field I know of where that's true is the priesthood. We are not priests. Nor should we be.
This post is right, but only because web technology is currently a second-class citizen on almost every native environment. If you were to expose system API's directly to the JS layer à la FirefoxOS, then I'm pretty sure you could recreate most "native" apps on web based platform with minimal / narrowing performance hits. Booting to browser technology can only get better with projects like ChromeOS and FirefoxOS pushing the envelope, so why not push for a unified application runtime in the web across devices? Sure, html wasn't made for rich applications, but html5 was...
