I almost laughed out loud at the part "Have you ever invented a programming language? :-)"

Off topic: It annoys me when people go "Oh you don't know this person? But they're so famous!" because not everyone knows all the famous people in every field.

And his use of parentheses is different than I expected:

(blabla :-) vs (blabla :-))

Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/541/

I usually do the second way, but put a space between the emoticon and parenthesis (like so :) )

<insert lisp joke here>

(cons "lisp joke" here)

To me, he always seemed to be a very jolly person. After seeing and hearing him talk, I'm not very surprised by a lot of emoticons.