Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)

I do think LISP remains the major language that can encompass the strange loop idea he explored in his work. I know LISP is not the only homoiconic language, but it is the biggest that people know how to use where the "eval" function doesn't take in a string that has to be parsed.

I hate that people are convinced LISP == functional programming, writ large. Not that I dislike functional programming, but the symbolic nature of it is far more interesting to me. And it amuses me to no end that I can easily make a section of code that is driven by (go tag) sections, such that I can get GOTO programming in it very easily.

Another (properly functional) homoiconic language that enjoyed mainstream adoption briefly in '00s is XSLT. Its metaprogramming features were rather widely used, that is, producing an XSLT from XSLT and maybe some more XML, instead of hand-coding something repetitive, was rather normal.

The syntax was a bigger problem than Lisp's syntax, though.

It's not easy to produce a language with a syntax that's good as daily use syntax, but is also not unwieldy as an AST. Lisp is one of the few relatively successful examples.

> The syntax was a bigger problem than Lisp's syntax, though.

Yeah. XML and S expressions are pretty close to functionally equivalent. But once you've seen S expressions, XML is disgustingly clumsy.