Really, though, "Lisp" in this context means "Lisp at its best."
I'm not sure it does, so much as an ideal Lisp which Common Lisp and historical Lisp practice only imperfectly embody. For example, I think Clojure only recently discovered how Lisp macros are really supposed to be done -- I suspect the use of namespaces for hygene represents almost as much of a watershed moment as the switch to predominantly lexical scoping. Now that we've got about a century of art in terms of the design of turing-complete languages (counting the programs written for the Analytical Engine), it's become fairly evident that ideal-Lisp is a very significant attractor in language design. Probably not the only one -- ML/Prolog hint at another attractor out there. But in any case we can get closer to it than "Lisp at its best".
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Date: 2009-12-22 01:06 am (UTC)I'm not sure it does, so much as an ideal Lisp which Common Lisp and historical Lisp practice only imperfectly embody. For example, I think Clojure only recently discovered how Lisp macros are really supposed to be done -- I suspect the use of namespaces for hygene represents almost as much of a watershed moment as the switch to predominantly lexical scoping. Now that we've got about a century of art in terms of the design of turing-complete languages (counting the programs written for the Analytical Engine), it's become fairly evident that ideal-Lisp is a very significant attractor in language design. Probably not the only one -- ML/Prolog hint at another attractor out there. But in any case we can get closer to it than "Lisp at its best".