[zbentley]

I wrote GGP as a Lisp user and enjoyer—not pretending to deep experience, but definitely am well acquainted. And neither the REPL nor live reloading are important differentiators. Neither is the ability to attach a REPL to a running program: plenty of languages have that built in (Erlang, Ruby), and many others support it through popular third party tooling (e.g. Pyrasite for Python, and—ironically—the class executor for the Clojure REPL for arbitrary non-Clojure JVM programs). Many Lisps’ REPL tooling is very nice, and the language lends itself well to REPL-oriented development. But those aren’t “uniquely Lisp” features as you and many others claim.

[iLemming]

Homoiconicity is a "uniquely Lisp" feature and it doesn't seem like you've fully grokked the implications and differences between homoiconic and non-homoiconic. I'm not making this up - every step there in Read-Eval-Print-Loop does differ. That is easily verifiable info.

[zbentley]

Eval differs very slightly from, say, an interpreter with a very non-syntactic AST, due as you say to homoiconicity. Neither read, print, nor loop differ in any Lisp-specific or qualitative way. And the differences in eval’s behavior don’t change anything significant about the REPL user’s experience (other than that they’re writing Lisp). So what do you mean?

Specifically, cached state and behaviors still need to be reconciled with new inputs/overrides during “eval”, and no Lisp has an easy answer to those (neither, as far as I know, does any other language). Avoidance of closure state via late binding and a convention of reliance on very simple data structures help Lisp’s REPL/hot-patch story, and that is indeed nice, but it’s far from “guaranteed ease/safety of REPL patching” or a totally different paradigm.

[iLemming]

> don’t change anything significant about the REPL user’s experience

Perhaps you have never tried/heard of nextjournal/clerk, scicloj/clay, djblue/portal, vlaaad/reveal or just simply tried building a simple web scraper with Playwright running on nbb. Oh, and hyperfiddle/electric - something like that would not be very trivial without homoiconicity.

[dismalaf]

Lol equivalents to all those exist in at least half a dozen non-Lisp languages.

[iLemming]

Lol, how are you so smart and figured just everything out, so already? I'd be so bored to ever touch the keyboard again. Bless Turing I'm so stupid and simple and keep trying different things just to see how they differ.