> in the Lisp community There is no such thing as "a" Lisp community, since Lisp is a term for a wide variety of different languages, each having their own com

> in the Lisp community There is no such thing as "a" Lisp community, since Lisp is a term for a wide variety of different languages, each having their own community. Common Lisp is a group of implementations (which are sub-communities), Scheme is a group of implementations / sub-standards (which are sub-communities), there are derived languages (-> Clojure)... > I think languages/platforms are less about the technology or features and more about shared values and community. Yes. > I guess my argument is that now, I don't really see a differentiator outside of macros. The larger topic is "symbolic computation" and Lisp itself is one application of it. Lisp cannot only be used to implement itself, but a range of languages. "Interpreter" in Lisp actually means "interpreting Lisp", where interpreter for Java means "interpreter for JVM byte code", which is something very different. An interpreter written in Lisp for Lisp interprets source code, which is actually data. Scheme, Clojure, ML and a bunch of more esoteric ones were first implemented in Lisp. Often languages and language extensions are integrated into Lisp. Racket (a variant of Scheme) makes language implementation one of its core features. > Maybe it's unfair, but I think my threshold here is "we used macros to build AI/something nuts". I don't think that's happened. There are many many usages of language extensions via macros, which are "nuts". For example the possibly first parametric CAD system called iCAD was based on Lisp + a dynamic object system, whose user-facing forms are macros. The language Lisp was thus extended to describe complex parametric CAD models. I once heard that Boeing had whole models of complex jets (think 747) described and loaded into Lisp memory. Turbines were described in Lisp and design changes could be generated via code&data changes. The cabin configuration of jets were described and computed with design rules in Lisp.