Although if you want to be maximally pedantic about it, homoiconicity you actually get for free in raw machine code. Though Lisp certainly "rediscovered" it in

Although if you want to be maximally pedantic about it, homoiconicity you actually get for free in raw machine code. Though Lisp certainly "rediscovered" it in an abstract language(though Church's lambda calculus is also homoiconic, and directly inspired much of Lisp so I suppose he deserved some credit too). I sometimes ponder about whether we'd be able to recognise any programming languages from alien civilisations. And I usually come to the conclusion that it would have to be either a lisp or a forth, because at their core they're so dead simple it's hard to imagine not inventing them by accident at some point. The fact that Lisp was invented so incredibly early on in computing history, and at least partially by accident, supports this hypothesis.