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by armchairhacker 1367 days ago
Lisp is more expressive: I can write any program in LC but I'd much rather use Lisp.

Similarly someone could write C or JavaScript or Swift or Haskell in LC. Although I'd argue Lisp is a bit better as it's one of the first languages, one of the first to involve functional concepts like code-as-data, and itself is based on really simple concepts like LC.
2 comments
tromp 1367 days ago
Haskell is more expressive. I can write any program in LISP but I'd much rather use Haskell. Btw, Haskell is much closer in spirit to LC than LISP is.
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somewhereoutth 1367 days ago
Yes expressiveness is a crucial quality.

I'd suggest that code-as-data is in fact not a functional concept, and indeed may not necessarily be as helpful as we might like to think.

Lisp strayed from the path somewhat when it embarked on runtime enclosure (if my understanding is correct), and anyway it was never going to be as elegant as a true rewrite system.

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