[TacticalCoder]

> Eval, on the other hand, that’s more of a capability that comes from Lisp’s runtime, which used to be unique when Lisp was thriving, but not anymore — JS, Python, Ruby, all of the runtime-based languages have an eval function.

And it's good we have those for troubleshooting but those eval still offer nowhere near the power of a Lisp REPL.

> and I am not sure how having eval can be argued as Lisp being the language of agents

I've seen several Lisp programmers saying that it's really the REPL (and the 'E' in REPL is for "Eval") that is the godsend when working with LLMs.

With LLMs we've seen terminals/ssh/tmux and CLI tools calling making a huge comeback (not that they ever went very far).

Now I wouldn't be surprised if we were soon to see a Lisp AI harness also using extensively the REPL becoming succesful.

It's too early to tell it's not a powerful combo (LLMs + Lisp REPL).

[gf000]

How is that different from other languages that have proper repls? Lisps don't really give you much here, if the language can parse itself and can eval it, you have the sufficient primitives.

What helps is how "small" the hot reloaded parts can get - lisps are good here due to a lot of functions and not much shared state. But that is again, not something specific to lisps, neither are they the best at it - there are far purer FP languages for example