Comment by cageface
3 months ago
I think it's quite telling that almost all of the innovations in lisp (garbage collection, first class functions, repl etc) have been absorbed into more popular languages except for s-expression syntax, which remains a small niche despite many great implementations of s-expression based languages.
Because as soon as you adopt the s-expressions, what you got is no longer <language>, but lisp itself. Something like this:
would become:
No. There is a good github gist rant I can’t find anymore, but if we call every AST in the form of s-expressions lisp, then is anything lisp? A programming language has to have an associated evaluation strategy, otherwise it’s just data. What you wrote only makes sense to execute as C code, which sure you can write a compiler for in your given lisp as well (so can you write a C compiler taking C AST in any other language, so it’s not special at all).
This one? https://gist.github.com/no-defun-allowed/4f0a06e17b3ce74c6ae...
It also responds to a few parents up "almost all of the innovations in lisp [...] have been absorbed into more popular languages" - pervasive interactivity hasn't even been taken up by some "Lisps", let alone has it been absorbed outside Lisp.
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Right. From which we can infer people like many things about lisp except for the syntax.