One of the inventions of McCarthy (and team) was that EVAL can be defined in the core language itself (!) and thus serve as a relatively simple model of computa

One of the inventions of McCarthy (and team) was that EVAL can be defined in the core language itself (!) and thus serve as a relatively simple model of computation. Thus the particular EVAL is important, not that source code can be executed at runtime by some api call to execute code. That's part of the core of the language. Sure: Many other aspects from Lisp can be found also in Lisp-derived languages and other languages. Like all or some of runtime code loading, symbolic expressions, using symbolic expressions to encode source code, saving and starting heap images, garbage collection, managed memory, source level interpreters/debuggers, self-hosted compilers, read-eval-print-loops, macros, fexprs, integrated interactive development environments, ...