You could well be right (that a highly critical attitude does not prevent writing of useful code). But relating it back to "snobbery" - which I think is a high

You could well be right (that a highly critical attitude does not prevent writing of useful code). But relating it back to "snobbery" - which I think is a highly critical attitude and "therefore I'm better than you" - I don't think PG was damning the other dialects, but was criticizing specific aspects while appreciating other aspects (maybe: "this is really cool, but the syntax is annoying", "they had a great idea here, but implemented it stupidly"). I haven't read the essays in question, so it would be an interesting test to have a look...[time passes]... I just scanned the articles under under "lisp" on PG's site, and didn't see any criticism of lisp - only praise. While I'm sure that his criticism of Lisp exists, praise also does, so I think his highly critical attitude towards lisp dialects was not in order to claim that Arc is fundamentally superior, but to improve on some specific aspects.