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.

I love and relate to any impassioned plea on SWE esoterica, so this seems like as good of a place as any to ask: What, in practice, is this deep level of "homoiconic" or "symbolic" support used for that Python's functools (https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html) doesn't do well? As someone building a completely LISPless symbolic AGI (sacrilege, I know), I've always struggled with this and would love any pointers the experts here have. Is it something to do with Monads? I never did understand Monads...

To make this comment more actionable, my understanding of Python's homoiconic functionality comes down to these methods, more-or-less:

1. Functions that apply other functions to iterables, e.g. filter(), map(), and reduce(). AKA the bread-n-butter of modern day JavaScript.

2. Functions that wrap a group of functions and routes calls accordingly, e.g. @singledispatch.

3. Functions that provide more general control flow or performance conveniences for other functions, e.g. @cache and and partial().

3. Functions that arbitrarily wrap other functions, namely wraps().

Certainly not every language has all these defined in a standard library, but none of them seem that challenging to implement by hand when necessary -- in other words, they basically come down to conviences for calling functions in weird ways. Certainly none of these live up to the glorious descriptions of homoiconic languages in essays like this one, where "self-introspection" is treated as a first class concern.

What would a programmer in 2024 get from LISP that isn't implemented above?