You could choose to understand it that way, but only if you want to kill the conversation. Which is fine, of course. Judging by the amount of controversy mirrored in the voting of my comment (I suspect moderator intervention was involved as well), a large number of HNers really do believe that all non-Lisp languages are abominations, that there is no appropriate paradigm besides Lisp's, and that Lisp already contains all the innovations and concepts that could ever be worthwhile. That's an almost cartoonishly narrow way of thinking.

At best, this is a religious point of view, and at worst it's also a matter of being part of the in-group - which means this opinion is calcified because it's a critical part of these programmers' identity.

I generally don't like to comment on these kinds of threads anymore than I would on political or religious ones. However, this thread is about outreach to people outside of the cult. Continually forcing the impression of being a cult might well serve to recruit more followers, but I'm wondering: does it really have to be a dogmatic movement? Isn't the larger opportunity here to try and reach another kind of person?

I know there's a taboo in this community about addressing aggressiveness and arrogance, and maybe that's an excellent policy to prevent flame wars. However, I think it's a mistake to overshoot this target by accepting abrasiveness and fervor as valid replacements for reason and reflection.