The article is sarcastic, though it may not seem to. Take a while and look at the 'about me' page of author - you can read there that his favourite languages (Lieblingsprogrammiersprache) are Clojure, Common Lisp and Haskell. He also has some projects in lisp on his page.
However, haven't I read his page, I wouldn't understand it either. It seems like I'm not the only one who don't get it - it would be nice to hear from the author what was his point.
Right. So it is sarcastic. I guess I should have checked first.
Isn't that true when you call any user-defined function in any language? (Well, actually in Haskell I suppose you can tell if it has side-effects, but with "print" you'd expect it to anyway.)
> Also, you can't use Lisp in an interactive application, since garbage collection can kick in at any time and stop your program for a couple of seconds at a time.
Yeah, garbage collection sucks! Use Java! Or C#! Apparently.
> In contrast, Java and C# programs are compiled into efficient bytecode
In contrast to what? Compiling Lisp down to machine code?
Argh. You'd've thought I'd've learnt not to feed the troll. Sorry.