[busfahrer]

> Or maybe Lisp is so pure that it embodies both Light Side and Dark Side, like a god that spawned the programming universe.

This isn't so far off, considering that some people consider the "Lisp in Lisp" bit from the 1.5 manual to be the "Maxwell's Equations in Software":

https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equation...

[DonaldFisk]

I have always assumed that Alan Kay compared Lisp to Maxwell's Equations because of the similarity between the interplay of eval and apply in Lisp on the one hand, and the interplay of the electric and magnetic fields in Maxwell's equations on the other.

[agumonkey]

Also because lisp core can be reduced to a few "equations" (at least that was my understanding)

[GMoromisato]

Maybe machine language is the formless chaos and Lisp is the purest manifestation of order. All other languages are points in between.

[gf000]

That makes no sense without specifying what Lisp actually is.

S-expressions are a generic tree, that's not a language, that's just syntax.

Is it CL, Clojure, scheme?

Like these don't even share a basic object model, it's like getting the AST of Haskell and C and then talking about how good that AST is.

[throwaway81523]

See Cardelli's breakdown in his famous article "Typeful programming":

http://www.lucacardelli.name/Papers/TypefulProg.pdf

Page 52 perhaps.