Disclaimer: I'm Anglo Saxon, and I'm also a butcher in your terms despite spending reasonable amount of time and effort working to understand this stuff.
I think the key difference here is that code actually has to compile, so no matter how clever your lispy magic gets it's still grounded by that reality. Foucault (and Barthes, Saussure et al) are unencumbered by the constraint of their prose actually having to be parseable by anyone. Their prose is better thought of as an artistic performance than a functional machine.
> "Their prose is better thought of as an artistic performance than a functional machine."
Nail on head. The relationship between the words of the above and reality is similar to the relationship between a painting of a landscape and the real landscape. It's not that the painting is not valuable in itself, but it would be a mistake to think that it says anything about how the landscape actually works
I think the key difference here is that code actually has to compile, so no matter how clever your lispy magic gets it's still grounded by that reality. Foucault (and Barthes, Saussure et al) are unencumbered by the constraint of their prose actually having to be parseable by anyone. Their prose is better thought of as an artistic performance than a functional machine.