When he says "not much in terms of community to help answer questions or maintain your code", he meant "I can´t google my way out of a tough programming problem"
Lisp is not for sissies.
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Sometimes really remarkable programmers start out as "sissies", you know.
People who give the language a reputation of having a rude and insular community accelerate its death.
As opposed to the sophisticated self-proclaimed programmers who give PHP the reputation of being such an elegant tool.
Really remarkable programmers usually don't start out as sissies - they use, understand and improve upon the tools other remarkable programmers gave them. Or invent completely new ones.
And that is one reason why not to use Windows - it really won't help that goal. The whole environment is not conductive to this king of tool refinement.
I'm pretty sure nobody is saying PHP is elegant, just that they think it's easier to set up and drop in place than Lisp, and it's easier to find junior programmers familiar with it. Several loud voices in the Lisp community have implied that this isn't really a problem, which is a great way to convince people to write it off as a web programming platform.
Instead comparing PHP to Lisp for that purpose, I'd be more interested in a comparison between PHP and Python or PHP and Ruby.
"Instead comparing PHP to Lisp for that purpose, I'd be more interested in a comparison between PHP and Python or PHP and Ruby."
I agree. More to the point, it would be more interesting to compare PHP frameworks to Rails or Django, as Ruby and Python are more general purpose languages and PHP, while it can be used for other things, is built to generate HTML.
The original (quite lame) article is in the lines that "I tried to use this ocean liner to go to the supermarket and it is infinitely less convenient than the car I was used to. Nobody should use ocean liners because cars are more convenient". It´s awful.
I think the comparison Brian Hurt makes between "core" and "edge" languages (http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/09/20/programming-lang...) is pretty relevant here. "Edge" languages are often used as "glue" languages, because they're good at wrapping separate components and making them work together, while "core" languages are usually better for complicated systems that do most of their work internally, such as compilers. Lisp and OCaml are primarily core languages, while Python and Perl are primarily edge languages.
No, Lisp is for weenies.
There are some highly idiosyncratic bugs/problems I'd rather find the solution to on Google because finding the solution myself wouldn't be very edifying.