Nothing wrong with being an idealist, sure. There is something wrong when someone goes out of his way to criticize something for no reasons other than "it doesn't fit how I think things should be".
For a proper criticism, I would have liked at least a little more explanation of the advantages of actually using Lisp all the way down.
I'll try my hand at that: having a system built out of a few simple types of parts interacting in tons of different ways also leads to flexibility and power. Ant hives and bee colonies work in similar ways, one individual alone is useless and will probably die soon, and having a whole mass of ants just meandering around won't get you anything. Now, create a few (by which I mean very very few) rules for what happens when an ant meets another ant, and immediately you get a structure out of it.
For example, ants have the property of laying down pheromones. The interaction rule is knowing to follow another ant's pheromones (there are some subtleties with detecting certain types, for sure, like danger signals, but we'll keep things simple). If an ant doesn't have a trail of pheromones to follow, it will wander using its senses to find food.
Combine all of this and you end up with a system that gives you the quickest way to a food source. Simply because ants who have found the shortest route to a food source will probably return soonest, and other ants follow the pheromone trails they lay down.
Note that there's no real comparison method where all the ants sit down, compare notes, and try to figure out who has the shortest path. It emerges naturally.
For a proper criticism, I would have liked at least a little more explanation of the advantages of actually using Lisp all the way down.
I'll try my hand at that: having a system built out of a few simple types of parts interacting in tons of different ways also leads to flexibility and power. Ant hives and bee colonies work in similar ways, one individual alone is useless and will probably die soon, and having a whole mass of ants just meandering around won't get you anything. Now, create a few (by which I mean very very few) rules for what happens when an ant meets another ant, and immediately you get a structure out of it.
For example, ants have the property of laying down pheromones. The interaction rule is knowing to follow another ant's pheromones (there are some subtleties with detecting certain types, for sure, like danger signals, but we'll keep things simple). If an ant doesn't have a trail of pheromones to follow, it will wander using its senses to find food.
Combine all of this and you end up with a system that gives you the quickest way to a food source. Simply because ants who have found the shortest route to a food source will probably return soonest, and other ants follow the pheromone trails they lay down.
Note that there's no real comparison method where all the ants sit down, compare notes, and try to figure out who has the shortest path. It emerges naturally.