"All of those things are there for a reason, and most of them are very well thought out"
From reading about the history of LISP I'm not sure I agree. My take on it is that It was never meant to become a real language as it is now, some guy hacked together an interpreter for the s-expressions because it looked fun and easy, no-one ever bothered to take it further, and here we are.
LISP seems to be the bare mininum required to do whatever McCarthy was starting to explore and these days a lot of LISP nuts seem to think it is the coolest thing ever because of its minimalism without realising it was never meant to be that way.
Yeah, you can express anything in lists. You can also express any program in a turning machine. Doesn't mean you should.
But I don't know LISP well enough to say whether people who are commercially successful with LISP owe it to the language, or they would have been whatever language they use.
Yeah, my comment was a bit snarky. At least CL admits side-effects and non-pure functional programming are necessary.
McCarthy obv knew what he wanted to be able to express and process, but the LISP he ended up with after the s-expression interpreter was hacked together was like the assembly language he was going to compile m-expressions down to.
At the time his main alternative seemed to be FORTRAN. It would be interesting to see if he came up with the same ideas with today's computing landscape and keyboards that had more characters than a card punch. You could argue that many of today's languages incorporate more and more LISP ideas as they evolve but it still might look and work a bit different.
From reading about the history of LISP I'm not sure I agree. My take on it is that It was never meant to become a real language as it is now, some guy hacked together an interpreter for the s-expressions because it looked fun and easy, no-one ever bothered to take it further, and here we are.
LISP seems to be the bare mininum required to do whatever McCarthy was starting to explore and these days a lot of LISP nuts seem to think it is the coolest thing ever because of its minimalism without realising it was never meant to be that way.
Yeah, you can express anything in lists. You can also express any program in a turning machine. Doesn't mean you should.
But I don't know LISP well enough to say whether people who are commercially successful with LISP owe it to the language, or they would have been whatever language they use.