Leaving aside the question about whether the suggested division between "liberal" and "conservative" is a valid one...
It seems like people are not happy for their favorite language being labeled as "conservative". I don't understand why. Depending on the problem domain, "conservative" and "liberal" approaches can have their benefits and drawbacks. I used to work at a company developing software for electronic trading. If anyone said something along the lines "bugs are not a big deal", they'd get fired pretty fast, because actually bugs can be quite a big deal when they cost your customers hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions). On the other hand, a social networking site could probably allow such approach. Facebook seems to have embraced it: yesterday I actually had to post a comment about five times before it finally appeared. Now I know that what I witnessed was probably a result of a "liberal" approach to development :)
There are a few features from Yegge's conservative list that I wish Clojure had. For example there is some very interesting work going on to support optional static typing. https://github.com/frenchy64/typed-clojure
But this article was not about what is desired, but about what is -- Clojure is not currently very "conservative" according Yegge's definition, for better or worse.
I don't think it's the labels that are the problem for the 'conservatives'. As I said on the other post, I fully expected that the 'liberals' like myself would say 'oh, what an interesting distinction', where the conservatives would say 'that distinction is bullshit, you're just covering for the people who are wrong by calling them liberal'.
I think the real issue is that the 'conservatives' do not see what Yegge describes as the 'liberal' position as being a legitimate alternative at all, labels or not.
But most of the people in the discussion are those people writing sexy new programming languages, so of course they don't want to be labeled as conservative. The real programming conservatives are probably not even listening for the most part.
