The whole point of that section is that he wasn't there. He'd taken time away to get a Masters of Fine Arts, and this paragraph was his reaction to re-entering

The whole point of that section is that he wasn't there. He'd taken time away to get a Masters of Fine Arts, and this paragraph was his reaction to re-entering the world of programming and software. Coming back after 5 years and seeing that the journal he'd started that was focused on symbolic computation using Lisp has now expanded to include using other languages doesn't mean Lisp is forgotten. I browsed the titles of a bunch of the articles published by the journal after the name change, and most of the were language agnostic but still lisp-adjacent and potentially lisp-relevant. (For example, Volume 12 Issue 1, the second year with the new name, has multiple articles about call/cc using demonstration languages.)