I’m sure the author of this is actually a nice person, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen a lisper being smug and obnoxious in the way I’ve seen people satirize a thousand times.
Compared to much of what went on comp.lang.lisp this is pretty gentle. Based on the impression it gives of the book, possibly more gentle than it deserves!
I think the issue is that the topic comes up quite often as seen by the author needing to create the gist. It easy to come across as a bit of "smug and obnoxious" when you explain something for the xth time.
I remember chatting with them years ago and they were pretty friendly. But yeah Lisp does have a specific culture and it can put people off thought I personally never encountered any bad apples.
If the argument was not born from ignorance I think it'd be fine ;) There's a rich history, decades old, of people claiming Lisp can't do X or is bad for Y, or is only a category and the true meaning of Lisp as a category is just having s-expression syntax. Some Lispers get more touchy when such things come up yet again. Attempts to correct misconceptions do work a little bit but just like bad and false popsci memes (remember when the "you only use 10% of your brain" myth was more popular?) the false memes seem to spread more easily. It takes a long time to overcome them, if ever.
I don't know, it doesn't seem overly smug to me. It seems borne of experience and helpfulness.
"And a parser generator is very overkill for a Lisp parser - just use recursive decent!" -- it's interesting that, as simple as Lisp is to parse, this is the same advice you'd get from experienced C/C++ compiler writers, from modern Clang to Stroustrup in 1993.
With the exception of one or two sentences, it sounded pretty neutral to me... maybe I just didn't read it closely enough? The "dogmatism" of the technical criticism (assuming the post is accurate) really does seem justified to me—e.g. if the book uses dynamic scoping without even a disclaimer like "this is a bad idea, but we're doing it for simplicity", that alone makes it a bad recommendation for beginners IMO.
