If you're part of the 99% who know little of Lisp languages, he is correct. There's not much of a difference between 0.001% and 0.01%, when you're working in numbers like 20+%.
While Guix is the Guileverse's biggest and most successful project, a lot of the compiler/VM work that happens in Guile happens pretty independently because Andy Wingo just likes to hack on Guile. Guile would still be here, but the community would be smaller.
> i think any person with a cs education would at least recognise lisp syntax
The discussion wasn't on Lisp, but Guile. They may recognize Lisp syntax, but the majority will not have heard of Guile (let alone Scheme).
And you are referring to recognizing Lisp syntax, which is not what I was referring to when I said "know little of Lisp languages". Sure - most know it exists and has a lot of parentheses.
BTW, many if not most programmers don't have a CS education. And many who do don't encounter Lisp in their curriculum. I just checked my undergrad's required courses - the PL course has Java, SML, Prolog and Python - no Lisp. Anecdotally, in all the teams I've worked in for my career, there was only one team where people had an idea of Lisp. In the other teams, they didn't even know that it's the language with a lot of parentheses (as in they'd look at Lisp code and have no idea which language it was).
If you're part of the 99% who know little of Lisp languages, he is correct. There's not much of a difference between 0.001% and 0.01%, when you're working in numbers like 20+%.