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No. There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages - Ruby, Python, Haskell, etc. Every single stage there in Read-Eval-Print-Loop differs.

Man, it gets so exhausting trying to convince every PL critic who grabs a single (or a couple) of axis of any language and tries to dispute the value of a language without ever understanding the holistic, overall experience working with it.

Like, I don't understand, do people think that tons of Clojurians or Common Lispers who fall in love with the language after decades of working and getting seasoned in literally dozens of different PLs are on some kind of delusional trip or something?

Guys, just take a gander at Clojurians Slack; see what people are working on, what kind of stuff they're building; check their profiles. Many of them are the battle-scarred veterans of coding. Sure, some of them may have wrong opinions, but surely they can't be all wrong, can't they?

by zbentley3 minutes ago|

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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.

by dismalaf10 minutes ago|

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Tell me your knowledge of Ruby is surface level without telling me...

I used Clojure when it first came out, I've used Common Lisp for years, I've also used languages like Smalltalk and many others.

Yes, Lisp environments are nice, but sometimes I think Lispers are so insular they don't realize that other languages have similar things. R, Julia and Ruby have similar environments. Smalltalk is next level.

And homoiconicity is great for macros and parsing but it's late-binding that enables the live programming behaviour, which isn't exclusive to Lisp.

Also if you'd ever got deep into say, SB-ALIEN, you'd know the limitations too; Common Lisp isn't magic, it can't just redefine say, instantiated structs in memory. It relies on pointers then switching references on the fly.