Mmmm. This article is like one of those duck-rabbit pictures, isn't it? With a slight mental effort, you can read it one way, or another way. So, here are some

Mmmm. This article is like one of those duck-rabbit pictures, isn't it? With a slight mental effort, you can read it one way, or another way. So, here are some excerpts: These advantages ("It’s a lot easier to support matching, indentation, coloring, and so on", and "tools hit the trifecta of: correct, useful, and relatively easy") are offset by one drawback: some people just don’t like them. It feels constraining to some to always write programs in terms of trees, rather than more free-form syntax. Still, what people are willing to embrace for writing data seems to irk them when writing programs, leading to the long-standing hatred for Lispy syntaxes. But, you argue, “Now I have a bicameral syntax! Nobody will want to program in it!” And that may be true. But I want you to consider the following perspective. [...] a bicameral syntax that is a very nice target for programs that need to generate programs in your language. This is no longer a new idea, so you don’t have to feel radical: formats like SMT-LIB and WebAssembly text format are s-expressions for a reason. The last three paragraphs play upon each other: people hate Lispy syntax; people dislike bicameral syntaxes; S-expressions are bicameral syntax. And notice that nothing in those excerpts and nothing in the text surrounding them (sections 4 to 7) really refers to the ability to access the program's syntax from inside the program itself. In fact, the sections 1 to 2 argue that such an ability is not really all that important and is not what makes LISPs LISPs. Then what does? The article goes on about "bicamerality" (explicit distinction between the reader and the parser) but doesn't ever mention again the ability of the program to modify its own syntax or eval. I can't help but to make the tacit deduction that those never-again-mentioned things are not part of "bicamerality". You, perhaps, instead take those things as an implicit, never-going-out-of-sight context that is always implied to be important, so those things are never mentioned again because already enough has been said about them but they still are crucial part of "bicamerality". It's a duck-reabbit article. We both perceive it very differently; perhaps in reality it's just an amalgam of ideas that, when mixed together in writing, lack the coherent meaning?