Comments like that make me sad. They illustrate that phenomenon where zealots often have these curious blind spots in their understanding of the focus of their

Comments like that make me sad. They illustrate that phenomenon where zealots often have these curious blind spots in their understanding of the focus of their zeal. For example, I would personally not consider macros (let alone reader macros or gensym) to be something that a language must have in order to be called a lisp. Such an opinion implies that the first true lisp was not introduced until a 15 years after the first language that called itself lisp, and tacitly casts McCarthy himself as one of those hapless poseurs who tried to pass an unconvincing lisp wannabe as the real deal. (At least according to the timeline given in Steele and Gabriel's history of lisp. https://dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf https://dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf) Getting twitchy about the syntax also seems somewhat odd to me, considering that Lisp 1.5 did things like cons (x (y)) => (x y)