> Whatever the case, when I see a programmer doing a linear search through a linked list, I think you must agree that I'm justified in saying that I have no reason, based on that observation, to trust in that programmer's competence. In fact, I think it could easily be argued that in the absence of additional data, it would actually constitute a reason not to trust the programmer's competence

In Erlang, the most common data structure is the linked list. There's no way to search them other than linearly. You are claiming that in general we should suspect that Erlang programmers are incompetent?