Show HN: Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser

Ah, in an alternate world where Brendan Eich wasn't pressured by his superiors to make JS more Java-like, we could have had something like this as very normal.

I wonder how much faster that would have pushed the world into FP ideas. While sometimes I prefer the bracket/C syntax, I wonder how things would have evolved if JS was a lisp originally. Instead of things moving to TypeScript, would they be moving to something like typed Lisp or OCaml, or PureScript ?

Is CL really particularly more “functional” than JavaScript? I don’t know CL but I know it bears some passing similarity to Emacs Lisp, which is usually written in a pretty imperative style. Sure, it has first-class closures but so does JS.

I kind of agree, but in the interest of discussion: even if CL isn't necessarily a more functional language in practice, culturally it's got a long history of being more functional. It took something like a decade at least for people to widely recognize to how elegant (in its quirky way) JavaScript could be. Just as a point of comparison (I'm sure the idea goes further back) PAIP - one of the definitive CL books - was first published in 1991 and encourages pure functions and immutability wherever possible.

Devs in the 90s were handed a language that looked like a weird Java and so they programmed it like a weird Java. If they were handed a language that looked like Lisp instead, maybe they would have made their way to SICP that much sooner.