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by klyrs 1837 days ago
Is lisp more powerful than JS? Not really; you can write lisp in JS. But that's a correct answer to a wrong question. Lisp is fun, but IMO it's wrapped in undeserved mythology. Maybe I'm just jaded, but if you move parens one word to the right and sprinkle commas between tokens, it's downright readable to a c programmer. That said, homoiconicity is powerful and spreadsheet-based metaprogramming could be super cool.

What I haven't seen is a maturation of spreadsheet-based programming. Code and data are mingled in cells, and excel (and clones I've used) hide the code and display the data in an opinionated manner. That's a huge UI problem, IMO. But, mingling code and data can be very fun! Perhaps lisp could be cool for that, but I'd actually prefer a concatenative array language to really take advantage of the spreadsheet UI. So, go read up on Forth and APL, and bake their unholy offspring into a spreadsheet. Nothing bad can come of this.