I find the word 'homoiconic' very hard to define anyway. For example, I think Tcl is also often described as homoiconic, which manifests in being able to make e

I find the word 'homoiconic' very hard to define anyway. For example, I think Tcl is also often described as homoiconic, which manifests in being able to make e.g. custom control structures (https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/code+is+data https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/code+is+data) although something like Haskell also deals with that quite well. However, in say Javascript, you would need to use special syntax when using every {} so that the block content can be seen (e.g. by wrapping it in a function, or passing it as a string to be eval()ed). In the case of Unix, the question is probably "what is the canonical representation of executable code". I think the author's intent was to mostly talk about shell scripts, and not something like C code. Manipulating shell scripts via e.g. sed is, I think, pretty doable. I'm also a bit confused why homoiconicity needs to be convenient to be real. Most people don't find shell a very convenient language in other aspects, either.