"I think of Donald Knuth writing TeX in Pascal, and a very conservative least-common-denominator subset of Pascal at that. He may have been able to develop TeX faster using a more powerful language, but perhaps not much faster."
Knuth himself said he didn't think he could have written TeX without his literate programming tools, right? Which fits the pattern of Lispers extolling metaprogramming, though without their built-in support.
(Despite which, I don't in fact think Lisp makes you a genius, or even significantly better than with other popular languages -- though it was a different story back in the 80s when I learned it.)
Knuth himself said he didn't think he could have written TeX without his literate programming tools, right? Which fits the pattern of Lispers extolling metaprogramming, though without their built-in support.
(Despite which, I don't in fact think Lisp makes you a genius, or even significantly better than with other popular languages -- though it was a different story back in the 80s when I learned it.)