The whole point of lisp is that it rolls around picking up new ideas. Haskell was originally implemented in lisp. Examples: Lexical scoping (ALGOL) The 'form

The whole point of lisp is that it rolls around picking up new ideas. Haskell was originally implemented in lisp. Examples: Lexical scoping (ALGOL) The 'format' macro(I believe Fortran) The 'loop' macro (COBOL? Pascal? not sure?) Type systems ala Qi and Haskell (ML and typed lambda calculus influenced) Optional type declaration are probably to approximate C. You can implement prolog it... I believe lisp machines even had GC'd versions of C, Pascal, and other languages written for them. Personally, when I read "all roads lead to lisp," it is taken with tongue firmly in cheek. Lisp isn't really the 'best' language, it just ends up being able to subsume all of the ideas from them. In RPG terms, Lisp is the red mage. This is why I like it a lot; given a certain problem domain, you can approximate the global optima that is reached in another language.