Comment by swannodette

I agree with Peter Van Roy on this - mainstream programmers tend to have an unclear picture of the relationship between syntax and semantics. This goes for both C-style and whitespace based mainstream languages. Every syntax brings along hard-wired semantics like a ball and chain. But the ball is not particularly heavy, in fact sometimes it's light enough to not be much of a bother. This actually explains quite a few things - people tend to be satisfied with whatever language they've become comfortable with (in fact they get angry if somebody actually points out the ball and chain). The few people that actually take the time to learn several dramatically different languages discover that ball and chains come in all different kinds of shapes and sizes.

But I believe there is a sea change going on and Lisp will only benefit from it. That sea change is Functional Programming. Functional Programming is very much concerned with optimal semantics. The more people understand that semantics and syntax are inextricably intertwined the sooner they'll see that Lisp has been and continues to be one of the best ways to rapidly prototype and build optimal semantics.

But this also means Lispers need to constantly look at other languages - the optimal semantics are constantly evolving and changing (Racket and Clojure are doing a good job of adopting better semantics).

On that note, I'd like to say that you've done an incredible job at pointing out that the ball and chain is there to far more mainstream programmers than anyone else I know. Thanks for that.