As always, I'm very glad to see that structural, Common Lisp-style macro systems with the whole language available for macro construction, have been successfully adopted in other languages to the point where it's possible to explain them without a single mention of Lisp in the article, or even better - where a mention of Lisp anywhere else except for the very beginning would make the article
worse by making a unnecessary detour.
pg's article on the topic, "What Made Lisp Different", [0] has aged poorly, and points 8 and 9 it makes (a notation for code using trees of symbols and the whole language always available) are no longer Lisp-specific. The final point, about "inventing a new dialect of Lisp", doesn't hold true either - as seen here, Julia is doing just fine not claiming to be another dialect of Lisp, even though many sources mention directly that it's Lisp-inspired.
Congrats to Julia people for the macro system and to the author for the article!
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html
pg's article on the topic, "What Made Lisp Different", [0] has aged poorly, and points 8 and 9 it makes (a notation for code using trees of symbols and the whole language always available) are no longer Lisp-specific. The final point, about "inventing a new dialect of Lisp", doesn't hold true either - as seen here, Julia is doing just fine not claiming to be another dialect of Lisp, even though many sources mention directly that it's Lisp-inspired.
Congrats to Julia people for the macro system and to the author for the article!
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html