[Max_Limelihood]

This is a really good explanation of why I find Julia (effectively a Lisp in terms of these features) to be indispensable. The ability to generate code on the fly makes life so much easier that I just can't live without it.

[vchuravy]

Yeah I often describe Julia as a Lisp in sheep's clothing.

Or as the m-Lisp promised to us :) I chuckled when I read:

> The way that common Lisp systems produce executable binaries to be used as application deliverables is by literally dumping the contents of memory into a file with a little header to start things back up again.

Which is pretty much of Julia's sys-/pkgimages work. Pkgimages are an incremental variation on this idea.

One of the novelties in Julia is the world-age system and the limits on dynamisim it introduces on eval.

[pjmlp]

Pity that Apple didn't push Dylan.

[JanisErdmanis]

I agree that Julia satisfies the first two properties however, it's not clear how it satisfies the third one (homonicity). In particular, how the argument with regard to Python does not apply to Julia as well?

[adgjlsfhk1]

I think this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/31734725/5141328 by one of Julia's creators fits here. The TLDR is that homoiconicity is a mix of two separate things: how willing a language is to represent itself, and how close the syntax for code is to the syntax for the data-structure representing that code. Julia meets the first of these, but not the second. Whether this matters depends on why you care about homoiconicity. The biggest difference between Julia and Python here is that Julia has syntactic macros and python doesn't (although see https://peps.python.org/pep-0638/)

[epgui]

I just don't understand people who call von neumann style programming languages "lisp-like" or "almost a lisp". I've heard people say this of python and haskell as well, and I just don't see it, at all.