[n42]

I considered making the case for the parallels to Lisp, but it's not an easy case to make. Zig is profoundly not a Lisp. However, in my opinion it embodies a lot of the spirit of it. A singular syntax for programming and metaprogramming, built around an internally consistent mental model.

I don't really know how else to put it, but it's vaguely like a C derived spiritual cousin of Lisp with structs instead of lists.

[Twey]

I think because of the forces I talked about above we experience a repeating progression step in programming languages:

- we have a language with a particular philosophy of development

- we discover that some concept A is awkward to express in the language

- we add a special case to the language to make it nicer

- someone eventually invents a new base language that natively handles concept A nicely as part of its general model

Lisp in some sense skipped a couple of those progressions: it had a very regular language that didn't necessarily have a story for things that people at the time cared about (like static memory management, in the guise of latency). But it's still a paragon of consistency in a usable high-level language.

I agree that it's of course not correct to say that Zig is a descendent or modern equivalent of Lisp. It's more that the virtue that Lisp embodies over all else is a universal goal of language design, just one that has to be traded off against other things, and Zig has managed to do pretty well at it.

[bsder]

> I don't really know how else to put it, but it's vaguely like a C derived spiritual cousin of Lisp with structs instead of lists.

Zig comptime operates a lot like very old school Lisp FEXPRS before the Lisp intelligentsia booted them out because FEXPRS were theoretically messy and hard to compile.