I'm not sure I know any genius people let alone programmers.
And I definitely do not know of anyone who programs in VB6.
However, I am some what familiar with John Carmack. I would consider him a genius programmer. Yet he uses C++ almost exclusively. You would have to ask him if he thinks it's the most powerful language available to him. However, I would hazard a guess that his choice of C++ was incidental (http://rome.ro/smf/index.php?topic=3086.0) -- it just happened to be the de facto lingua franca for developing graphics intensive video games.
By orhtogonality I mean to imply that attributes of one are not affected by the other. Lisp is and will continue to be a powerful language with or without genius programmers using it. In fact, if genius programmers are exceptional and rare as we say then I would imagine Lisp has developed over the last fifty years almost exclusively without the help of geniuses. Similarily, not all geniuses will think to use Lisp; yet they will still be exceptional programmers and produce exceptional software.
Update: Included link to thread about an alleged response from Carmack to an email asking about C++. Apparently he uses it and has used it since Doom3.
EDIT: I stand corrected: It looks like John Carmack has indeed been using C++ since Doom 3. I sheepishly admit to having based my believe that he still used C on having looked at the Quake 3 source code many many years ago. What next, Carmack decides that he prefers Direct3D?
Point taken about the orthogonality of language choice and programming ability. There are great programmers who use Lisp, there are great programmers (like Mr Carmack) who use C and then there are great programmers like Richard Stallman who can write Emacs in Lisp and then write GCC in C (albeit with a Lispy flavour).
"I actually think Direct3D is a rather better API today. [For example], Direct3D handles multi-threading better, [while] newer versions manage state better," Carmack told Custom PC.
And I definitely do not know of anyone who programs in VB6.
However, I am some what familiar with John Carmack. I would consider him a genius programmer. Yet he uses C++ almost exclusively. You would have to ask him if he thinks it's the most powerful language available to him. However, I would hazard a guess that his choice of C++ was incidental (http://rome.ro/smf/index.php?topic=3086.0) -- it just happened to be the de facto lingua franca for developing graphics intensive video games.
By orhtogonality I mean to imply that attributes of one are not affected by the other. Lisp is and will continue to be a powerful language with or without genius programmers using it. In fact, if genius programmers are exceptional and rare as we say then I would imagine Lisp has developed over the last fifty years almost exclusively without the help of geniuses. Similarily, not all geniuses will think to use Lisp; yet they will still be exceptional programmers and produce exceptional software.
Update: Included link to thread about an alleged response from Carmack to an email asking about C++. Apparently he uses it and has used it since Doom3.