Comment by kerkeslager

> The language with the best chance of lasting a long time is the one with the simplest syntax.

If you're going to make an argument for Lisp, I think focusing on syntax is the weakest argument you could make. Simplicity is good, sure, but syntactic simplicity is a very surface-level form of simplicity. Consider:

    (def inc (n)
      (+ n 1))

    def inc(n):
      return n + 1

    fn inc(n) {
      return n + 1;
    }

    inc(N) -> N + 1.

These are fictional example syntaxes, but you can see where my inspirations come from. The point is, these all express the same things. There's some argument about which syntax is clearest, but that's mostly going to be based on what languages people already know. It's a bit silly to argue what's clearest from some sort of ideal pure world where people coming into your language don't know any other languages, because that's not the world we live in.

Now consider:

    (def void incAll (((list int) ns))
      (decl int i)
      (for (= i 0) (< i (length ns)) (++ i)
        (++ ([] ns i))))

    def incAll(ns) {
       return map(ns, n => n + 1);
    }

In the first example, we're doing C-ish things in Lisp-ish syntax, and in the second example we're doing Lisp-ish things in C-ish syntax. As you can see, doing Lisp-ish things in C-ish syntax works pretty well (and lots of modern languages do this). But doing C-ish things in Lisp-ish syntax is an abomination--in fact, the simpler syntax actually forces us to do more weird stuff to get around not having more complex syntax for more complex operations.

This gives us a clue that maybe simple syntax isn't inherently simpler to use. At least some of the simplicity of Lisp comes from the other ideas it brings to the table. And notably, nothing prevents us from using those ideas in other languages.

Discussion of Lisp syntax can't fail to mention that Lisp's simpler expressions enable its powerful macros. Lisp true believers will wax poetic about how Lisp macros allow you to create domain specific languages. But in practice, macros are are often just an opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot and create hard-to-debug bugs. If you're introducing macros, the simplicity argument starts to fall apart because you're adding a massive amount of complexity.