This is a very "Internet" comment, but what struck me about the title and very many other titles in the software engineering world is that I'm not sure it's the best idea to belittle readers in the title. The implication of "<x> for normal people, mortals, dummies, etc." titles is that the reader is not on the level of the author of the book and the authors of the tool or topic that one is learning about. Specifically, "for mortals" implies the author and programming language author are immortals, or at least not mortal. I realize this is taking the title more seriously than probably intended, but this type of framing pops up a lot in the software and programming world.
hi, i am the author of this book and i agree with you. it's not a good connotation. i chose it because: 1. it is kinda memorable (look there are so many programming books with exactly the same name) 2. the language is named after an immortal being who guides mortals through the afterlife in the fictional property the good place, so there's some kinda connection. but i agree the implication that janet is somehow "hard" to learn or that the author is somehow "on a higher plane" is bad. i waffled on this a lot but never came up with another title i could stand and ultimately just pulled the trigger. (but note that i left myself some wiggle room with a neutral domain name.) i hope the tone of the book itself helps to counteract the title, but ya know who knows
This isn't really a specific complaint about this book. Just triggered my thoughts on a general theme. Thanks for writing the book. I might look into it, as I'm generally interested in Lisp/Scheme-likes.
I could see this is if the title was "for morons" (or something like it), something implying a class division. But 100% of humans are mortal. Everyone is mortal, including the author. So there's no real division here, no two tiered system: we are all on the mortal tier.
For that matter, the For Dummies books have subtitles that refer to "the rest of us". So the actual reader as well as the author are not necessarily one of the dummies.
I think a more charitable interpretation of the title is an implication that the other material written for Janet was written for supergeniuses (or whatever), so here's a book finally written for normal people.