A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

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The article is nice to read, but doesn’t really answer the question of “why lisp” imo.

Oh, I thought at first it was going to be this road, but it is a different road. Losh’s road is a bit more detailed in several ways, so while I don’t want to detract from OP road, I do want to point to it so that those who are looking for roads to lisp do find it if they haven’t seen it before.

I find the defmacro examples unconvincing when applied to small control structures like and/or, while, or even with-open-file because to my Haskeller eyes it's using a really big hammer (macros) to address the fact that you can't write lazy functions.

I think there's probably a stronger case to be made for macros where you're generating novel but expressive control structures, or cutting down on boilerplate in a way that other languages struggle with (Haskell's macro system, Template Haskell, can be a bit of a bear to write by hand). I never got my head around the CLOS either, but people say it's really powerful.

At the end of the day, sexprs are a joy to parse and to write, but I find types and laziness add so much more.