&quot;Lisp doesn&#x27;t exist&quot; is also kind of wrong but with conviction, or at least debatable. Lisp was standardized in 1994 as ANSI Common Lisp, and there are a handful of other Lisp-like languages.<p>And pure languages aren&#x27;t useless. Not being able to do I&#x2F;O can be good for many purposes. Pure Haskell is still able to model computations involving I&#x2F;O, which are then executed by a trusted external runtime. There are benefits to disallowing arbitrary effects, which is also why several new languages take purity even further and disallow infinite recursion.