Do their moderation/review processes meaningfully improve the situation for users?

Both app stores are replete with scam/spam/spy/malware apps. I'm not convinced that the app stores are able to materially affect the quality of apps that go through.

Back in undergrad we used to program our HP calculators in RPL, Reverse Polish Lisp, which I found very hard to grok at the time but a few of us managed to cobble together a set of utilities to render the final exam of third year electromechanics pretty trivial.

Good times.

That's an absurd reduction, and not at all analogous to the situation discussed in TFA.

One programmer can be amazingly productive due to how expressive and flexible the language is. I find my "developer velocity" (eyeroll) is much higher in lisp than in almost any other language.

>Or hot code reloading, which sounds like a powerful concept except that companies would rather log and document their codebase.

I think this is a benefit primarily realized during development cycles. You never "CTRL+C, edit, recompile, run". You just recompile the single function or statement and things just keep on trucking. If your production environment is containerized you'd obviously rarely be hot-reloading, but how often are you changing prod, anyway?

Multiple things can simultaneously be true.

Is he just posturing for his fans?

I see so many statements of this nature from him and I just can't believe that a person that successful can be so monumentally stupid.