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by expando 4081 days ago
Why not? It seems interesting to me. I've always called scheme/racket a lisp, and I never knew that anyone felt differently. Does this mean that clojure is also not a lisp?
4 comments

That discussion is about as pedantic as a discussion can be.

The main point against seems to be "they didn't name it Lisp". From there it goes into weird accusations like that people call Scheme a Lisp to defame Common Lisp (WTF?). They also say stuff like "Lisp and Scheme parted ways" which is just ignorant of the fact that "Lisp" in that context means "Common Lisp" and most people saying "Scheme is a Lisp" are basically talking about languages inspired by McCarthy's Lisp. But instead of making this reasonable counterargument, people start arguing that Scheme has a lot of similarities to Lisp (meaning Common Lisp).

And that link is one of the more intelligent debates on the subject. It's a long-running debate and most places I've seen it discussed are even more confused.

I just can't be arsed to give a fuck. Usually when I'm talking about Common Lisp I say "Common Lisp" because I value actual clear communication over saving six characters. And when I say "Lisp" I usually mean "languages inspired by McCarthy's Lisp" (which includes Scheme), but it's pretty rare I have anything useful to say about such a broad group of languages.

That's a whole lot of history, neatly packed.
It's a holy war, like vim vs emacs and tabs vs spaces. Tread carefully.

If you want to read more on it, there's a discussion in the Wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IsSchemeLisp

If scheme isn't a lisp, then clojure almost certainly isn't.

To use more widely known languages: Is C++ a C? What about Java? Javascript? Those languages share a lot of syntax and keywords between them, but they are clearly distinct languages.

On the other hand, most people feel comfortable classifying both FORTRAN and C as "in the algol family" while nobody would call either of them an algol.

Actually, if you're at all familiar with the history of FORTRAN, you can see how much it has changed, while nobody denies that FORTRAN 2003 is still as much FORTRAN as FORTRAN IV.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Erik Naggum's comments on that holy war thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum

I was pretty disappointed to see that he got his hands dirty in that discussion.