I guess my problem is that he's implying that simple systems are bad because they can be easily implemented by anyone. It is very easy to write a Scheme interp

I guess my problem is that he's implying that simple systems are bad because they can be easily implemented by anyone. It is very easy to write a Scheme interpreter, and a lot of people write very bad interpreters, but that doesn't imply Scheme is a bad language. Java is a lot harder to implement, so the few implementations out there tend to be very good. As for language, I agree that the C programmers left are on average better than the average Python programmer (I'm not using Java for this example because I don't actually know much about Java), but that doesn't imply that it's better to use C than Python because the average C programmer is better than the average Python programmer. Personally, I'll use Python wherever I can even though I'm a better C programmer than Python programmer, simply because getting things done in Python is on the whole easier.