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> The biggest reason, of course, is what some > have called the "de-skilling" of IT.

I don't buy that. There are countless software shops that are obsessed with programmer skill and productivity, in fact live or die by it, and almost none of them choose a lisp.

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De-skilling has nothing to do with that, it has to do with changing jobs so that they require less skill. Assembly line factories are an example, they were an efficiency improvement over individual craftsmen that not coincidentally required much less skilled labor. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling and http://www.google.com/search?q=deskilling+programming and http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&f...

Even then, in knowledge work you're obviously going to care about skill.

(Sure wish I'd believed a book on this subject (the deskilling of programming) that I read in the '80s; knowing what a recipe for technical failure it is I didn't. Unfortunately all too many suits believe it.)

The most astonishingly skillful programmers use lisp more often than average or crummy programmers, but it's still an unusual choice among them. Look at the results of the ICFP programming challenges.

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