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All languages are slowly converging back to being a LISP.

It's just time.



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Indeed lisp is slowly (very very slowly) doing this. Witness how it seems to get reinvented or embedded in every other language.

Good take. Back to Lisp, then? What are we waiting for?

That's just the latest in a long list of languages. This is a process that has been going on for nearly as long as lisp has existed - so nearly as long as people have been programming.

aka the fall of lisp

I'm glad a language other than Lisp can finally eat it's own tail.

Seems like every sufficiently advanced language at one time or another turns into LISP.

Lisp is biding its time as all other languages slowly evolve into Lisps. Eventually, they will all merge and there will be one language and it will be Lisp.

Yeah, just look how so many concepts from Lisp days are only now slowly becoming mainstream.

I want my Lisp Machine back :)


I love that we now live in an age where older languages can suddenly start seeing a renaissance. I hope something similar comes to common lisp.

Oh my gosh. When are people going to give up and just admit that Lisp (=lisp-family) just wins? The list of dead contenders for The One True language is breathtakingly long, but it's Lisp that everyone eventually comes back around to. Even in the last decade we went thru PERL then Pyhton and now it's js. And everyone just keeps adding in more and more lisp to their language du jour (d'annee?) until, well, they just give up and build a lisp on top of it, like Clojure or Hy. Please let's just come together and get to where we've been headed for 50 years anyway.

Lisp was more or less abandoned in the 90s.

Lots of ideas have moved from Lisps to mainstream languages.

The thing is, will there be a time where people will stop dealing with a concrete specific language to stay at the `lisp` level, or will this keep going on forever ?

A decade ago it should‘ve been LISP :)

So maybe other languages have finally beat lisp at its own game? Makes sense from the wave of functional language features becoming popular in the 2010s.

Congratulations, JavaScript, on finding what Lisp had before most of JavaScript developers were even born.

In other words, the slow march for all languages to eventually become Lisp continues...


As languages improve, they keep moving towards Lisp — a story that has been playing out for decades. There is a reason Lisp is called "the final language".

Seriously. I just started looking into Common Lisp last weekend, and if it weren't for the active communities on Reddit and IRC, you'd get the impression that the language was abandoned some time in 2012.

Lisp isn't dead though. I thought the same thing about Forth.
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