Come in. This kind of editorializing and language partisanship is not what HN is about. The text referred to—"functional programming finally became truly conven

Come in. This kind of editorializing and language partisanship is not what HN is about. The text referred to—"functional programming finally became truly convenient and practical with the introduction of Mathematica's symbolic language"—may be an exaggeration, but it's not meant as a slap at Lisp. And the fact that so many academics use Mathematica on a daily basis, that they sell expensive licenses for their software so widely, suggests that there's a lot of truth to the claim.