That was the strength of Lisp as the original 'AI' language, but the following AI summer were always more numerical oriented (neural networks, bayesian inferenc

That was the strength of Lisp as the original 'AI' language, but the following AI summer were always more numerical oriented (neural networks, bayesian inference, SVM, neural networks part 2), so that particular strength was not very needed. And in the end the most important killer feature of an 'AI' language ended up being approachable and easy to use, and not the "power", which is why Julia goes with the "Looks like Python, feels like Lisp, runs like Fortran". And like you said, even without s-expr you can do it with macros (especially in a homoiconic language like Julia), for example: https://github.com/chakravala/Reduce.jl https://github.com/chakravala/Reduce.jl https://github.com/korsbo/Latexify.jl https://github.com/korsbo/Latexify.jl