> Every niche language

Lisp is not a really a programming language. It is an idea.

Lisp didn't emerge the way most languages do - someone sitting down to design syntax and features for practical software engineering. McCarthy was formalizing a notation for computation itself, building on Church's lambda calculus. The fact that it turned out to be implementable was almost a surprise.

And that origin story matters because it explains why Lisp keeps regenerating. Most languages are artifacts - they're designed, they peak, they fossilize. Lisp is more like a principle that keeps getting re-instantiated: Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Clojure, Fennel, Jank. Each one is radically different in philosophy and pragmatics, yet they all share something that isn't really about parentheses - it's about code-as-data, minimal syntax hiding maximal abstraction, and the programmer's ability to reshape the language to match the problem rather than the reverse.

The counterargument, of course, is that at some point the idea has to become concrete to be useful, and once it does, it's subject to all the same engineering tradeoffs as any other language. Rich Hickey for example made very specific, opinionated decisions that are engineering choices, not mathematical inevitabilities. So there's a productive tension between Lisp-as-idea and any particular Lisp-as-language.

> related to its practical value.

Don't be daft, preaching pragmatics to modern Lispers is like trying to explain synaptic connections and their plasticity to neurosurgeons. They already know what's what - tis you who's clueless.