Now that I'm out of the corporate tyranny and have my own company, I use lisp for everything. There's certain satisfaction in writing config files and persisting data directly in s-expressions. Any json requirements are triggered by exports to foreign systems.

Which Lisp, out of interest?

For folks that want all of this plus macros (and a lot of other great things), check out Elixir.

100% Elixir is much more a Lisp than Ruby is.

> He’s described Ruby’s design as starting from a simple Lisp, stripping out macros and s-expressions

Put the macros back! It would be so cool!

You kind of don't need them in Ruby, because everything is a method or an object or a closure and you can dynamically create and alter those at runtime. That's why Ruby is really good for ad-hoc DSLs in ways that Rust and Swift really are not.

I love Ruby, use it for most of my projects that don't require performance.

Nothing I would love more than a Ruby with a Common-Lisp like compiler and runtime. Unboxed types, native compilation, partial compilation, live image (Ruby has this but "faster Rubies" like Crystal don't), etc...

... or just use Common Lisp.

Which is what I do. One can dream though right? Of a world where Ruby stayed just a tad more Lisp-y and less Perl/C/Smalltalk/Unix-y.

Also I'm working on a DSL/Macros that give me more Ruby-esque quality of life things in Lisp.

That is actually Lisp influence on Smalltalk, and Perl, that eventually influenced Ruby.

From the article

> Matz has said as much. He’s described Ruby’s design as starting from a simple Lisp, stripping out macros and s-expressions, then adding an object system, blocks, and Smalltalk-style methods. The features most Rubyists fall in love with aren’t the object-oriented ones. They’re the functional ones, dressed in friendlier clothes.

But macros and s-expressions are two of my favorites parts of lisp!

Funny enough Lisp was originally meant to be written in a higher level syntax (with infix operators and everything).

But yeah, macros and S-expressions make it easier to write your own DSLs.

With decades later, Dylan and Julia becoming the only ones that kind of managed to get some adoption doing it.

For better or worse, parenthesis aren't that bad with the proper IDE tooling.

Totalle agree, I just googled it: "Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto heavily credits Smalltalk as the deepest structural inspiration behind Ruby’s object model. He combined Smalltalk’s beautiful object-oriented architecture and message-passing system with features from other languages to create a tool designed primarily for developer happiness." Including the closures and collection operations.

"Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people."

(Matz speaking at the LL2 conference some 20+ years ago)

No, its actual influence from Lisp-family languages (including Scheme). Yes, Lisp also influenced Perl and Smalltalk, but Matz was not ignorant of Lisp with the only influence om Ruby from Lisp being indirect through those other languages.

What have the Lisps ever done for us?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

Always fun to remind grugs that LISP invented "if" and GC.