I'm not saying being "pragmatic" in this way is "bad" or "wrong," and since this is pretty much a total derail, I'll stop engaging in this thread. But, like, this is the actual thing you said that I was responding to:

"the intellectually reasonable position for most people is to either ignore lisp or laugh at it"

I said that such a position has nothing to do with "intellectual reasonableness" because it's barely an intellectual position at all. There is no propositional content; there is very little thought involved at all; it's a default "meh" position that is more accurately labelled "laziness."

One should not sneer or laugh at languages like Perl, COBOL, or similar, simply because there are others we like better, or are more popular.

I used to be a HUGE Perl fan, and discounted Python for years. I figured that I already knew Java, and since Python and Perl were effectively similar, it was a waste of my time to study both. I now regret that. As formative as that was for my growth as a programmer, I've loved coding in Python more than almost any other language -- and I delayed that discovery by a decade because I wrote it off as "effectively the same as" Perl.

Sure, it was pragmatic to focus on one language that I was learning and using. But the reasons I did so were flawed, IMO.