[tinco]

If you remove macros and s-expressions from a simple lisp.. what remains?

Genuinely curious. If I'd had to guess I say just the spirit of the language, the macros being reincarnated as the highly dynamic smalltalk method system. The s-expressions being reincarnated as the blocks.

[nnq]

It remains something that people living on a strict OOP+procedural+Algol-like-syntax only are willing to swallow.

...otherwise they'll just go "yuuuck!" or "wtf?" or "this is weird" and walk back away to their cubicles. Ruby is great because it changed the culture by letting the kinds of people that wouldn't have dabbled in functional-ish programming or DSLs put their toes in the meta-water ...now hopefully, some of them will start to take swimming lessons :) (and a few will drown themselves and their friends, of course, but there are prices to pay for enlightenment)

[ajuc]

> If you remove macros and s-expressions from a simple lisp.. what remains?

java script :)

[nabla9]

Brendan Eich was hired to Netscape to "put Scheme in the browser", he ended up with Javascript.

see also: https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/js2/semantics/