Mmm, I think it's a huge stretch to say those languages were derived from Lisp. They certainly borrowed/stole a lot of features and were heavily influenced, but

Mmm, I think it's a huge stretch to say those languages were derived from Lisp. They certainly borrowed/stole a lot of features and were heavily influenced, but that's not the same thing. For instance, it would be way more accurate to say that Ruby is more derived from Smalltalk than it is from Lisp. (And not coincidentally, Smalltalk is a lot like Lisp in that it's a very minimalist language where most of the useful constructs are built on top of a very small core. And similarly it's also very balkanized.) By the way, I don't mean to imply I don't like these minimalist languages with powerful extensibility like Lisp and Smalltalk. They're very elegant. I just think that there's a very large tradeoff to going that route. If I'm writing code for myself I love using Lisp or Smalltalk, but if I'm working somewhere and I have to debug someone elses code, I kinda want something boring and unsurprising.