The point is that Lisp can be imperative too. But, because the language was not constructed according to the underlying physical architecture, it's not bound by the limitations of ALGOL-like languages.

So, rather than condescending, I find this interesting: these are two dissimilar approaches to solving problems.

Your comment about baking an apple pie 'without being able to state any specific steps how to do it but instead describing the pie as some set of interrelationships of the ingredients' was also an excellent statement of the differences between these points of view.

Barnsley's perspective was that relationships may indeed be a better way to describe structures. His concern was fractals, but perhaps the analogy extends to the logical structures that comprise a program.

What are the "limitations of ALGOL-like languages"? As Turing-complete languages, they probably do not have actual limitations, rather, they suggest a style of programming which may be more or less applicable to particular problems. Functional programming, depending on how pure it is, does have limitations, notably avoiding mutable state.

You can claim that it's interesting that there are these two approaches, but the quotation you gave was definitely condescending, because it flatly states that one approach is better than the other, despite the widespread success of the latter. The argument that it's good to abstract as much as possible from the machine is interesting, but to me it is by no means obvious.

I don't really see the relation with fractals. Although it is an interesting quotation, the relation of fractals to real world phenomena is often very dubious.