One of the comments nails it on the head (paraphrasing a little bit): lisp is the executable implementation of lambda calculus. So of course you will re-invent it. As much as any domain at some point takes on a computational flavor the closer it gets to having primitives that can be used to build a turing machine the closer it gets to being a lisp. That and having your computation being representable as a data structure comes in handy pretty frequently so you end up emulating lisp even if you didn&#x27;t intend to because the data&#x2F;computation duality is ever-present. None of this is an endorsement of lisp though since there is a very deep and fundamental reason that it keeps being re-invented. Lisp is the manifestation of the primordial soup of computation.