3 ms·

Yeah I just think when a language never has to go back and invent new syntax and junk to keep up, it’s probably doing something right.

• cageface 6y ago
  Lisp got a lot of things right and modern languages have borrowed a lot of ideas that were pioneered in various Lisps. But nobody has borrowed s-expression syntax and I don't think that's an accident.
  • samth 6y ago
    I don't think that's true -- we're discussing a language that was invented relatively recently and has sexpressions. It's just that if a language has lots of parentheses, it gets classified as a lisp.
  • john-shaffer 6y ago
    As soon as a language borrows s-expressions, it's a Lisp. This makes it impossible in practice for a non-Lisp to just "borrow" s-expressions. Definitely not an accident. On the other hand, you do have languages like XML which is basically a much more cumbersome syntax for s-expressions.