It's not a popular opinion. With all due respect to Norvig, I feel it was not a valid comparison. Java came out on 1996. Most people were not experienced in it

It's not a popular opinion. With all due respect to Norvig, I feel it was not a valid comparison. Java came out on 1996. Most people were not experienced in it and were still figuring out how best to use it at the time. The language and tooling were still immature. Lisp had been around for a long time then. And he was very good very experienced in lisp at the time. Plus he had the insight gained for the test afterward. So it is kind of expected to do well. The greater variance between programmers than languages is very telling. It shows experience and competence trump language difference.