[patio11]

Could a language ... cater to average programmers and be despised by hackers?

Who a language "caters to", who an "average" programmer is, and who a "hacker" is are all social constructs which have no relationship to the objective reality of what features are in a language. People who wish to assert their superiority are quite willing to do so regardless of the technical merits of the matter.

Thus, rather than wasting one's time with meaningless geek-on-geek pissing matches, you should probably just get back to writing software which solves problems for people. You can do that in most languages -- even in Lisp.

[jrockway]

Yes, exactly.

"Blub" is just a derogatory word for "you only know one programming language". Become fluent in a bunch of them, and then you have the information you need to make your own conclusion.

As you write more and more of your own software, you'll see what features make that easy for you. You'll also see what features you can live without. You might even come up with ideas for new language features, and you'll see the value of being able to implement new language features without writing a new language. Very meta, but everything is related...

[uninverted]

This question would be the length of a book if I had to define those words. Any hostility you detected was imagined. I was only pondering if a language in a certain style could be overly restrictive.