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Comment by rurban

7 years ago

Very simple answer: Nobody is obsessed with Lisp, but Lisp is just better. And almost every "new" idea or feature was prototyped in Lisp already several years ago. Most languages haven't caught up to the most basic Lisp features yet. e.g dump the running state to disc (with all loaded shared libs, open files,...), and restart from there later.

What's so good about it? See the relevant Lisp FAQ's. E.g. https://lisp-lang.org/ It is compiled and memory safe. Dynamic but fast. Trivial to parse, code as data. Readable macros. Huge stdlib. The first ANSI standardized language.

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rurban

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kazinator  7 years ago

> The first ANSI standardized language.

Not quite; the "ANSI first" in relation to Lisp is supposedly that CLOS is the first ANSI standard object system, which makes Common Lisp the first ANSI standard OOP language.

Of course there were plenty of ANSI languages before 1994!