Comment by simongray
3 years ago
Many Common Lisp users unfortunately have this tendency to refer to other Lisp dialects as "not real Lisp" and often don't bother to explore the value propositions of the newer dialects, particularly Clojure-inspired dialects such as Janet. At least, this has been my experience as a Clojure user for several years now.
I would think that there are many dialects, but they share a common core. Common Lisp is just one. Others would be Emacs Lisp, Visual Lisp, Interlisp, Standard Lisp, ISLisp (which is an ISO standardized Lisp). Something like Janet is further away, given that it is not a 'List Processor' - it does not use linked lists as a core data structure. It would be more a 'Maps Processor'. Rounded parentheses are neither sufficient nor necessary to be a 'real Lisp'. In a wider definition JavaScript is a Lisp. Maybe, but IMHO it is not very helpful to and it's not the most important categorisation for it. Personally I would also think that a language is not less useful/interesting when not labelled as core Lisp. A label does not make a language 'better' or 'worse', it just makes clear what to expect.
> often don't bother to explore the value propositions of the newer dialects
There are a lot of languages I would find interesting, besides those that one might or might not label as 'Lisp': Prolog, Erlang, Julia, Rust, OCAML, ...