Sorry, my bad. Upon carefuly re-reading your original post I can see the point you were actually making, rather than the one I thought you were making. I comple

Sorry, my bad. Upon carefuly re-reading your original post I can see the point you were actually making, rather than the one I thought you were making. I completely agree that there is nothing special about Lisp-class languages rather than those of other classes. In fact, I would go further. Having implemented a small Scheme on .Net and also having read thru most of the Clojure code on the JVM, I'd guess that the OO/statically typed nature of both platforms gets in the way of Lisp-like languages more than those of other paradigms. So, in effect, I may "more than" agree with you. >> You're saying, in effect, that a language with s-expression syntax needs the extra boost of being on a popular VM to make it. Actually, my guess is that all future non-DSL languages are going to need to be built on a popular VM/framework in order to succeed, because of the advantages I listed in my earlier post. A DSL can get by without a popular platform because, by definition, it doesn't extend beyond its narrow scope and thus doesn't need access to a broad range of libraries. Also, DSLs don't tend to be performance sensitive and therefore don't need the compiler optimizations. What I was really responding to was the fact that you are the co-author of Arc, and I was (wrongly) seeing your post in that context. My apologies for confusing the issue, although I do think that the point I'm driving at is an important one.