This is intelligently argued and articulate but the content is a bit lacking.

First, Paul Graham isn't an expert on languages. He wrote a decent Lisp book, years ago. Relative to VCs, he's a technical genius. Relative to technical geniuses, he's a VC. I respect him for taking iconoclastic positions against the Establishment, and I miss that Paul Graham, but... he has serious blind spots when it comes to, say, statically typed languages.

Now, PG probably intended "Blub" to mean a mediocre language du jour like C++ (in the early 1990s) or Java (since the late '90s) but Blub is more of an attitude than a language. Yes, there really are one-language programmers who can't think out of a specific paradigm. They exist, and they're the ones who write FactoryVisitorFactory classes because they haven't been exposed to functional programming and the right way of solving certain problems. That said, there are cases where C or Java is the absolute right language to use. Not many, for Java, but they exist. Not everyone who uses those "Blub languages" is a mediocre programmer; Java is not always Blub, and C is definitely not always Blub (in fact, it's out of fashion among the Blubanistas, who avoid low level programming because "it's too hard".)

As for "Flub"... I don't even know where to begin. Just going to snipe specific points.

'Power' and 'Expressiveness' turn out to be separate concepts. In the end, there is no simple continuum that you can use to line programming languages up, nose to tail, feeble to awesome.

I agree with this, whole-heartedly. Assembly and C, I would argue, are more powerful than Haskell because it makes it so much easier to create custom control flows and to manage memory explicitly. Haskell is more expressive. You trade some power, in exchange for a language that allows you to write very robust code, very quickly. But sometimes you need that power and C is the best option.

To use it effectively, however, requires using an IDE, and Flubbists hate IDEs, partly because their finger muscle memory has been overspecialized from spending too much time in Eighties power editors, but also because using an IDE is too closely associated with Blub practices.

No, we dislike IDEs (actually, we don't; we dislike broken languages and codebases that require us to use IDEs) because it's a lot easier to keep flow when you're using the keyboard only. Switching to the mouse to recompile breaks flow.

IDEs also have a stigma because they're most useful when you're maintaining other peoples' code, which generally is a disliked sort of work given to juniors. So, IDEs tend to be associated with the second-class programmers who spend most of their time on maintenance work. I, personally, think the "reading code is for losers" attitude that many programmers cop is stupid and counterproductive. I enjoy reading good code and I wish that I had better tools for doing it.

A disruptive startup is more likely to use Blub in creative ways, focusing on the idea, not the implementation. Facebook dominated its market - using PHP - which everyone agrees is crap. Google built up the world's biggest advertising agency using Java and C++; Android is a Java-like ecosystem that runs in most pockets these days.

Oh, this shitty argument. "Your tech should be boring, your product should be interesting." Yawn. It's a bullshit argument and I'll tackle it another time.

Google was originally written in Python, which was more of a reach than Haskell is now. Python sucked in 1998. Also, the late '90s were a time when PL was considered to be a dead field, so PL never worked its way into Google's DNA and it's stayed that way. They use C++ because it was the best choice in the late 1990s, and they tolerate Java in the context of acquisitions, and when they tried to come up with their own language... the best they could do is Go.

Facebook started on PHP but is increasingly innovative on the language front, with Erlang, Ocaml, and Haskell getting a presence.

You put a group of merely good Lisp programmers on a project, and embed them in a corporate environment, and the stellar results are likely to be not reproducible. (I don't doubt they will be more productive than Java programmers. But will the result blend?)

"Will it blend?" I'm sorry, but I prefer not to think of my work as something that will be ground to a pulp. If that's the kind of work you want, then hire a Scrum drone, not someone like me.

Big companies understand this problem well, and prefer Blub programmers, who are easier to source and come with less attitude.

False. Do Haskell programmers come with more "attitude" than mediocre Java programmers? Yeah, there's probably a slight difference. However, the problem isn't "Haskell programmers" or "Java programmers" but people. People are just a pain in the ass: all of us, to some degree. Since you need 30 Java programmers to do the work of 5 Haskell programmers, you not only have more sources of "attitude" with the 30, but you have more politics and less per-person productivity on account of the larger team.