What Made Lisp Different (2002)
Lisps are like tiling window managers... Some have a taste for them. Most, don't.<p>Unfortunately some of the Lisp cool features are hard to implement without its simple syntax. Maybe the lesson is that <i>we should find a f way to have syntax-independent programming languages!</i> Just as we expect any successful language to have at least a couple implementations before being taken seriously, maybe we should expect a language to have at least a couple different alternative syntaxes and instant perfect translation between them (with comments and code style preserved), so I can use syntaxA and work on same codebase with my colleague using syntaxB. Than we'll be sure any metaprogramming or code intelligence tools don't suck because they'll be <i>damn forced</i> to not use the program text but the AST (that will <i>have to</i> be standardized) as they should instead...<p>Lisps would not even seem so cool anymore if we could get our s together and build languages with (a) standardized AST representations and (b) multiple syntaxes... we've like already imported most lisp features into modern languages anyway, and standardized ASTs would make macros both trivial and manageable...