> sometimes the language disguises itself by choosing conservative language defaults that are maximally compatible Also, they don't like to change their name v

> sometimes the language disguises itself by choosing conservative language defaults that are maximally compatible Also, they don't like to change their name very often. Seriously. It matters. Lisp has been Lisp for the past six decades or so. Therefore, someone who learned Lisp in the 1970s thinks that Lisp Is Lisp and therefore hasn't changed, except maybe for a few dialects. (After all, C and Java are just Algol dialects, right?) The fact Clojure actually has a new name is likely more important to its success than anything else the language creator did for it. "I don't know what the technical characteristics of the standard language for scientific and engineering computation in the year 2000 will be... but I know it will be called Fortran." John Backus