I've met quite a few lisp programmers over the years, about half of them mediocre -- particularly those who only knew lisp. Reason being that they learned lisp for a job, and that was just the language the job was in. I might believe that only good programmers pick up lisp on their own, but mediocre programmers follow the money.
The excellent lisp programmers I've known have been polyglots -- folks who can dig deep, know how memory works, know how cpus work, know how their lisp works under the hood. The mediocre ones just bash stuff together, oblivious of the details, and the result is no better than javascript.
I’m intrigued that you’ve experienced a world where people learned Lisp just to get a job. Would you please elaborate? I confess that I can’t imagine an employer that desperate for Lispers today.
The driver is actually that the company needs people with a specific skillset, and their tooling is in lisp. As I saw elsewhere on HN today: "you can teach a biologist to program, but you can't teach a programmer biology". I don't think anybody is "desperate for lispers" unless their senior guru is recently departed.
I haven’t met anyone who started with Lisp, only those graybeard types who ended with Lisp after 20 years. Where do people work with Lisp at an entry level? I can imagine that code base would be a shitshow unless they have a ridiculously competent architect.
Lots of people had their first, and possibly only, programming exposure to Lisp as the scripting system for something else (i.e. Emacs, AutoCAD etc.) I'd go so far as to speculate that orders of magnitude more people learned it that way than have ever learned Lisp for the sake of learning Lisp.
The excellent lisp programmers I've known have been polyglots -- folks who can dig deep, know how memory works, know how cpus work, know how their lisp works under the hood. The mediocre ones just bash stuff together, oblivious of the details, and the result is no better than javascript.