The majority of programmers fall into the non-expert category. They can see the differences between some of the less powerful languages like Visual Basic or Java™. They do not, however, understand how much more powerful some languages are.
You have to have a deeper understanding of languages to be able to compare them effectively. If you don't understand closures or continuations, for example, then you won't understand why languages that support them are more powerful than languages that don't. If you don't have a good grasp on the idea of self modifying code then you have no hope of understanding why lisp macros are so incredibly powerful.
Someone who only knows languages like Java™ or Visual Basic or C#, will not be able to appreciate why Smalltalk (or Ruby, or Lisp, or ...) is a more powerful language than what they already know.
Right on!
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