[whent]

For me Lisp enlightenment was when I realized everything is lambda all the way down (except of course for lists and atoms). I mean we don't really need all the various fancy let, let*, defun expressions to do programming. let, defun are all just abstractions on top of LAMBDA expressions. That means that we don't need some 30 odd keywords to bootstrap a language like we do in C. We can bootstrap a language implementation with some 8 or so special forms and everything else can be defined in terms of those. Isn't that beautiful?

[tromp]

> lambda all the way down (except of course for lists and atoms)

List and atoms can be defined in terms of lambdas as well (see e.g. [1]).

You don't need any special forms at all. Perhaps we should talk about Lambda Enlightenment?

[1] https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html

[noman-land]

Loved reading this. Thank you.