It's always bothered me how imprecise we are with words as computer scientists. Lisp is not a language in the sense that Python or Java is. PLT Scheme is much (

It's always bothered me how imprecise we are with words as computer scientists. Lisp is not a language in the sense that Python or Java is. PLT Scheme is much (much!) farther from elisp in feature sets than Python is from Java. The only thing unique to Lispy languages (and really not at all that hard to understand) is the language syntax and the way the compilation rules are late-bound. That is, the compiler is intended to be extended by the user. Roughly, you're intended to be able to say "unless (...)" will translate to "if (!...)". The rest of the design decisions made aren't even that outlandish: you still have text which is parsed and either interpreted or compiled into machine code, which is run. More foreign (and interesting), I think, is the research being done at Alan Kay's lab now: http://piumarta.com/software/cola/ http://piumarta.com/software/cola/