Brilliantly written piece. Though I never knew about LISP back then (and I can't claim to be as brilliant as the guys he's describing), I do remember very clearly when in my final High School project I did a web application with Java and PHP and the bullshit of XML (back in the time when J2EE was the bee's knees) and unsound engineering almost turned me off programming. Haskell and Python got me back into it, though.