That is close to saying that all languages are equivalent given the same amount of experience.
Not quite - there are a bunch of languages that are "up there" in terms of expressivity: Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, ML, etc. There's no data to say "learning Lisp will give you an enormous productivity boost". There is only data to say "people with 30 years experience in Lisp/Smalltalk/whatever tend to be very good programmers". And, well, duh.
Also, if he had to do it in C, say, could he really not? Even if he needed to invoke Greenspun's Law in the process...
Even if he needed to invoke Greenspun's Law in the process...
The question is whether that always happens for a complex system. Because if it does, then every sufficiently advanced programmer is a lisp programmer.
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That is close to saying that all languages are equivalent given the same amount of experience.
Not quite - there are a bunch of languages that are "up there" in terms of expressivity: Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, ML, etc. There's no data to say "learning Lisp will give you an enormous productivity boost". There is only data to say "people with 30 years experience in Lisp/Smalltalk/whatever tend to be very good programmers". And, well, duh.
Also, if he had to do it in C, say, could he really not? Even if he needed to invoke Greenspun's Law in the process...
Even if he needed to invoke Greenspun's Law in the process...
The question is whether that always happens for a complex system. Because if it does, then every sufficiently advanced programmer is a lisp programmer.