[p_l]

The choice of language is anecdotally strongly correlated with programmer skill, but the best evidence I've seen was not about "Programmers using language X are better than language Y", but about availability of programmers.

Counterintuitive, it was the "elitist" lower numbers involved in some languages (not just Lisp) that were found to be advantageous by some companies in hiring. Essentially, it selected out people with lower experience and those not willing to learn a new language. An example I was given was that choosing Common Lisp and combining it with globally remote hiring greatly increased the quality of incoming applicants - and that had they went with the popular option (Python in their case) they'd have to deal with deluge of fresh bootcamp grads of which many had unwarranted high opinion of themselves.

Both Kina Knowledge and ITA Software (and from what I heard but can't cite now, other companies as well), teaching people Common Lisp on the job apparently tends to work pretty well, and willingness to master a new language correlates much better with good skills. It does have the disadvantage of not being able to throw a new hire directly tickets to solve, but the timeframes I was given were essentially "it takes around a month for new hire to go from zero to productive lisp programmer".

[csande17]

Exactly. The average JavaScript programmer is much worse than the average Lisp programmer not because of any inherent features of either language, but because JavaScript is the first thing beginners learn in bootcamps. It's the same problem PHP used to have.

[User23]

Common Lisp certainly gives you the tools to make an unmaintainable rat's nest out of your application, but it also gives you the tools not to. I expect there's survivorship bias here.

More generally what you're referring to as elitism is really just the result of a simple theorem. As the size of the set of Xlang programmers approaches the size of the set of all programmers, the average competence of an Xlang programmer approaches the average competence of all programmers. The asymmetry is that, as far as I'm aware, there aren't really any significant languages that attract small communities of abnormally incompetent programmers. On the other hand, there are languages, like Haskell, the MLs, and some Lisps, that do attract relatively small communities of abnormally competent programmers.

None of this is to say that someone that only writes JavaScript can't be an exceptionally competent programmer. We're talking about group averages here.

[p_l]

Well, that's one way of looking at it, the one I've been thinking of is that the distribution of competence is similar in all languages, but with niche ones it becomes easier to filter because good applicants do not disappear under deluge of bad ones.

There's also survivorship bias in sticking long enough with programming to actually look for jobs in niche languages or accept that you will be taught on the job, something that I've seen only with either experienced or more open-minded/educated people

[Zababa]

I think that's because usually with "elitist" programming languages you can freely play with ideas, way more than with other languages. I remember reading in "The passionate programmer" that they increase their signal to noise ratio a lot when trying to recruit Java developers by looking for Smalltalk developers.