[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