[kragen]

Well, most mainstream languages are dialects of Lisp (though usually with syntax, records, methods, and sometimes static typing) so if you strip them down far enough you get Lisp. Other reasonably usable minimal programming languages do exist, like the lambda-calculus, the pi-calculus, Abadí and Cardelli's object calculus, the ur-Forth, and the ur-Smalltalk, but they're not as familiar.

[edgyquant]

Most mainstream languages are descended from C which is not even lisp-like. Not sure why you would make this claim.

[z3phyr]

Garbage collection was developed for Lisp. That way, any language with GC borrows directly from Lisp.

Lisp introduced the notion of Symbols, which is just String Interning. That way, any language with String Interning borrows from Lisp.

REPL based development was Lisps forte. Any language with a REPL borrows directly from Lisp.

Anonymous functions are a feature of Lisp since 1958. Any language with Anonymous functions is a descendant of Lisp.

I could go on, but we are not exactly talking about syntactical lookalikes but semantic lookalikes too. Java, C# with LINQ, Python, Perl, Ruby, Julia, Common Lisp, Clojure, ML family, Rust hygienic macro system (from scheme), C++ anonymous functions ... almost everything takes a lot of features originally started by LISP

[yesenadam]

>Garbage collection was developed for Lisp. That way, any language with GC borrows directly from Lisp.

The English language borrows a lot of things directly from other languages. That doesn't mean it is "a dialect of" any of them, which was the claim being objected to–that "most mainstream languages are dialects of Lisp".

[z3phyr]

> "Dialect of"

Programming languages are not natural languages. The usual definition (which is loose) of a dialect in natural languages does not actually apply on "programming languages", which I repeat do not even classify as natural language.

Comparing our natural definition of a "dialect" to a PL definition of a dialect is erroneous.

I will not defend the parent's use of the word dialect anymore, and I think "decedent" is the right word to go.

[grawprog]

Lisp enthusiasts (sycophants) could likely argue (probably convincingly) that English itself is in fact actually a dialect of lisp.

[lispm]

More like that some English users will claim that their language is a Lisp dialect. Which then actual Lisp users will find controversial and they will get attacked as having no clue.

[kragen]

To put this in context, while I've never written a program in Common Lisp, ZetaLisp, Clojure, or Scheme as anything other than an exercise, I've been writing elisp for a quarter century (though casually, never having written a new major mode), I've written a self-compiling compiler in a subset Scheme targeting i386 assembler and a raytracer in Clojure. I've used Python and JS on a daily basis for about 20 years.

So, does that make me an "actual Lisp user" or not? I think so, although clearly if you don't think Python and JS are Lisps, the case is weaker. I feel like probably anyone who's written a self-compiling compiler in Scheme qualifies as an "actual Lisp user", though. Of course, there are people who debate whether Scheme is really a Lisp, but I think that's a sufficiently fringe viewpoint that we can simply ignore it.

[kragen]

English is a dialect of Proto-Indo-European. It has enough of a mix of features from Latin and especially French that I wouldn't be comfortable calling it a dialect of Proto-Germanic or Old Norse; but nobody would ever confuse it with a Sinitic or Semitic tongue. In the same way, C combines features of Lisp, such as recursion, the heap, and conditionals, with features of FORTRAN and COBOL, like static types, nested records, and statements.

Spanish, by contrast, is clearly a dialect of Latin, despite the presence of articles, and in the same way Python and JS are dialects of Lisp.

If you're interested in understanding the deep nature of these differences, I wrote an essay about them at http://canonical.org/~kragen/memory-models

[2038AD]

You're confusing languages "descending" from others and dialects (varieties of a language). It's true that there's not a strict boundary between dialects and languages but thinking English is simply a dialect of Proto-Indo-European is muddy. The better version of the argument is that English is a dialect of Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European would be the variety of Indo-European spoken at a particular time (though it's in fact entirely reconstructed). To follow the linguistic analogy, popular programming languages are creoles (like English). They combine features of multiple languages.

[kragen]

The first part sounds reasonable.

I hadn't thought of English as a creole, even though it combines features of multiple languages, because there's no evidence of a pidgin evolutionary state. But, like a creole, it does have a substantially more systematized grammar than either its Scandinavian substrate or its French superstrate, both of which, for example, inflect for gender. And it certainly shows evidence of rapid historical change, like many creoles, and some of that seems to have been driven by decreolization-like processes. So maybe English really is a creole.

The linguistic analogy starts to break down there, though. In some sense all programming languages are pidgins, and of course they are conlangs.

[yesenadam]

I don't think "dialect" means what you think it means.

[kragen]

Right! Also conditionals (if-then-else), recursive functions, dynamic typing, and eval all originated in Lisp in 1959. The first two of these are even in C. http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html goes into some details. In http://canonical.org/~kragen/memory-models I go into some details on how the Lisp memory model is the basis of, for example, Java, and what some of the alternatives look like.