cool read

about scheme not really being a lisp, i think common lisp, cojure and scheme are all lisps, but they’re very clearly different languages. it doesn’t look like it for most people, but i think it’s similar to romance versus chinese languages. to most people, mandarin and cantonese are “dialects of chinese”, but they’re farther apart than french and italian. due to eurocentrism, romance languages feel closer to us, making the differences more noticeable, while chinese languages feel more foreign, so the differences don’t matter that much. we live in a c-like-centric world, so c, c++, and java will be considered completely different languages, while scheme and common lisp, which are way more different from each other than c and java, are seen as “dialects of the same language” just because they happen to use the same parens-oriented syntax