> I find it plausible that making a lisp is easier, especially if it's interpreted, but it's not that easy. As an example, here's a guide for writing a Scheme

> I find it plausible that making a lisp is easier, especially if it's interpreted, but it's not that easy. As an example, here's a guide for writing a Scheme interpreter in a matter of hours: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_... It definitely doesn't take it months to walk away with a working implementation. Whether or not the language you've just written is actually useful or preferable to alternatives is a different question, and there I agree with you that communities, libraries, and language maturity can take a long time to build. Lisp's simple syntax makes it a prime target for creating new dialects (like Clojure) to experiment with semantics.