[0xpgm]

From the article

> Matz has said as much. He’s described Ruby’s design as starting from a simple Lisp, stripping out macros and s-expressions, then adding an object system, blocks, and Smalltalk-style methods. The features most Rubyists fall in love with aren’t the object-oriented ones. They’re the functional ones, dressed in friendlier clothes.

[wglb]

But macros and s-expressions are two of my favorites parts of lisp!

[dismalaf]

Funny enough Lisp was originally meant to be written in a higher level syntax (with infix operators and everything).

But yeah, macros and S-expressions make it easier to write your own DSLs.

[pjmlp]

With decades later, Dylan and Julia becoming the only ones that kind of managed to get some adoption doing it.

For better or worse, parenthesis aren't that bad with the proper IDE tooling.

[to11mtm]

> For better or worse, parenthesis aren't that bad with the proper IDE tooling.

Hell, even without [0], you can at least count the parenthesis by hand in a pinch. I remember seeing lots of crazy-awesome stuff done in AutoLisp by 'non-programmers', versus 'structure as spacing' in Python which really sucks if the Editor was designed to use the system default (probably non-monospaced, cause other products in the industry had dialogs that broke if you switched to a monospaced) font. [1]

[0] - but real talk parenthesis matching in an editor is a lifesaver

[1] - oooooold version of a very popular GIS product.

[wglb]

Reminds me of my first exposure to Lisp. It was in a survey course in my final year. This was using punched card input and output on a line printer. You could turn on paren counting, but it was clumsy at best. This was in 1970