I’m fascinated that some people in our field choose to self describe themselves as “elite”.

Are there any programming/computer science greats that self aggrandize like this? Is it a cultural thing somewhere that I’m not aware of?

I've known Joe for decades. I've never heard him describe himself this way, but I can confirm that it is true. He is amazing.

I've been programming in Common Lisp for a quarter century and that list item made me cringe.

Most well known Dijkstra, who it can safely be said, is one of the greats. Though this blog post is a little much with the whole elite thing there is a little much, I think a rather terrible attitude that is antithetical to it is that of 'Democratization' which seeks to strip skill and need to learn from building and interacting with technology often at the expense of many positive attributes. It hates any thing that requires skill or simply prior learning to use well despite often these things meaning the system overall can better serve the user better and one the prior work has been done is more effective.

Further this 'Democritisation' can be seen as trying to deskill something that taking away many positives and having contempt for skill. I believe This is often simply to devalue software developers and I assume you are one so I believe we should both be cautious of this devaluation.

I think a more interesting question would be why should we not have elite's and I don't know if I am unusual but false humility always rubs me the wrong way?

Roughly just over one-thousand people, precisely 1,337 people self-describe as elite in the field.

I interpreted this as being a little tongue-in-cheek - reflecting the obscurity of CL and the way the expressiveness of a lisp can make you feel powerful that others will struggle to understand

"Für Elite" by Letrec Var Bughaven

Describing oneself as "elite" (or sometimes "l33t") is something people in this field have been doing for a long long time.

Lisp is a highly expressive language with little constraint, so there’s plenty of room for individuals to become strongly opinionated. That leads to a bit of elite mindset.

I don't get the impression the author is attributing eliteness to themselves. Wanting to use tools designed by and for "the elite", whomever that is, doesn't mean one necessarily considers themselves to be elite.

When it comes to writing software, I don't consider myself elite, but neither do I want to use a language designed by some mid-level engineer. Do you?

It seems to happen a lot with Lisp enthusiasts for some reason, usually without any evidence to back it up.

It always makes me laugh because the real world runs on C/C++, not Lisp. So perhaps by “elite” they mean something other than being successful in the real world? Maybe they think they “get it” while everyone else doesn’t, which somehow makes them “elite”? A bit like conspiracy theorists who think they’re among the few smart enough to know the “truth.” Not sure.

https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

Once you've toiled on the learning curve of Lisp long enough to really grok it you might begin to think you've discovered the foundational bedrock of the universe. From that perspective it's kind of hard not to be a little condescending toward fans of other languages.

It doesn't help that younger programmers today who complain about "too many parentheses" are largely unaware that Lisp was the original language of AI because the guy who invented AI also invented Lisp to help him do AI. I for one am just a tiny bit chuffed about that because I'm certain that more and better progress on LLMs (and beyond) would have happened had Lisp been used instead of Python as the primary vehicle for AI exploration.

So yeah, I damn well consider myself elite and I won't apologize for it.

Too noob to get it

Elite programmers are people that have excelled at their field for decades. I know I excelled because I have patents, publications, successful products used by millions (if not billions) and a bank account to prove it. Elite coders reading this will just nod, but noobs will make a noise like “huff huff huff” while frantically typing angry responses.