Does Lisp still have any special feature which has NOT been adopted by other programming languages?By Lisp, I mean all the Lisp programming languages as a whole. I've been told how amazing Lisp is and know that many languages have been inspired by Lisp. But does Lisp still have any exclusive design feature that just cannot be done in any other language?The reason I asked the question is that recently, being an amateur programmer myself, I began to learn Clojure just for fun, and the result is that I found lots of Lisp-related posts and comments, saying but one thing: Lisp is unique, but other modern programming languages have already adopted and stolen lots of ideas from Lisp, like conditionals, recursion, and the function as a first-class citizen. And even metaprogramming can be done by many languages.Did I miss out something and is Lisp still different?Or I'm lucky because other modern languages have stolen all the good parts from Lisp so that it's not necessary to dig into the parentheses Lisp world, and Lisp was different.
Does Lisp still have any special feature which has NOT been adopted by other programming languages?
programming languages;lisp
A canonical reference for this type of question is Paul Graham's What Made Lisp Different. The two remaining key features of Lisp that are not widely available, according to this article at the time of its writing, are:8. A notation for code using trees of symbols.9. The whole language always available. There is no real distinction between read-time, compile-time, and runtime. You can compile or run code while reading, read or run code while compiling, and read or compile code at runtime.The commentary addresses each point and names popular languages where that feature is available.8, which (with 9) is what makes Lisp macros possible, is so far still unique to Lisp, perhaps because (a) it requires those parens, or something just as bad, and (b) if you add that final increment of power, you can no longer claim to have invented a new language, but only to have designed a new dialect of Lisp ; -)Note that this article was last revised in 2002, and in the past 11 years there have been a wide variety of new languages, some of which may incorporate all these Lisp features into their design.