I have no horses in this race and I'm sorry if I misunderstand but I don't think he means to say Lisp is by nature superior to say Haskell. I take it as a statement on the generality inherent in its design. It is by its very nature very low on restrictions. Which is to say your freedom of expression is very nearly as complete as it'll ever be.
Sure you can beat Minecraft into Lisp and then Lisp into Haskell - as Turing made sure of - but you'll be battling a lot of dragons along the way. It's beautiful that you can beat Haskell into letting go of its type system by, say, creating a C compiler in it. It actually still amazes me the universe has this property.
In general I see "building" (I rather call it "conjuring") a system as going from the most general (all of your programming "language") to the specific (your solution). I can see how the most general of languages makes for a comfortable starting point of that downward journey.
I can also see how not starting from The Universe In All Its Infinity Glory (Lisp) but from The Planet Earth (say, Haskell) is helpful if you want to conjure something made for humans, but if you want to go beyond the mortal plane.. (I'm not saying that's a good idea by the way).
My issue is that a language is just as much about what it disallows, as much as about what it allows.
It's absolutely trivial to allow everything, you just have to make a Turing-complete extension either by design or accidentally.
It's much much harder to carefully choose more limiting primitives that only allow you to build stuff that keep certain important properties about them. You can't subtract stuff after the fact.
E.g. something like rust's borrow checker could not be realistically implemented as "a lisp" macro (what does lisp even mean in this case). For that to work you would literally build a rust compiler over s-expressions and you might as well leave off the s-expressions at that point.
And every part that was not compiled by that macro or whatever would be unsafe and could not interact with the "rust-lisp" compiled parts, as you can no longer assert anything about them (there is nothing mandating the usual single writer, xor multiple read-only references laws)
I agree. Restrictions are core to software development. In fact without them I don't think there is development in the first place. As you know I see software development as going from the general (the full bandwidth of the computational substrate available to you) to the specific (the absolute minimum - if any - computational structure you need to get what you're after).
Rust is more restrictive than Lisp. These restrictions are sane and productive for most general software development in 2026. They form an excellent base to start your work in this day and age. Starting with raw Lisp feels like starting with the general notion of mobility instead of just getting in a car. The car is not inferior at all. It's a set of restrictions on the most general notion of mobility that in fact buy you a lot of comfort like knowing it doesn't need to eat hay or take a poo in the street. The freedom they take away, they give back in strong, useful guarantees about stuff you actually care about ("getting places").
I can see how Rust, Haskell or whatever provide a set of comfortable, general-enough restrictions to make life for the common developer easier and more productive.
This being HN I do want to allow myself some contrarianism and point out that finding the most minimal, yet most general computational substrate is not at all trivial. It's in some ways equivalent to finding the most minimal set of invariants ("laws of physics") that can describe the most wide range of phenomena ("nature"). Which is to say I find it pretty damn impressive. So I only "disagree" with this:
> It's absolutely trivial to allow everything
I don't disagree because it is wrong, it's clearly not. Turing shows all languages collapse into one when it comes to computational power and I don't doubt that. But I do know there is a distance between the computational substrate, the primitives of the language, and the structures it expresses. Let me give an example.
A spreadsheet can represent a computer game. A game engine can represent a spreadsheet. But if you build Excel inside Unity you haven't made Unity spreadsheet-like at the substrate level; you have encoded spreadsheet semantics in Unity's primitives. Functionally they may be equivalent, and that equivalence is beautiful and Turing can tell you all about it, but the relationship between the native primitives and the concepts being expressed is different.
Turing makes building endless towers that are functionally equivalent possible, but what I mean is that there is an architectural difference between a system directly built out of the least semantically committed substrate available to it ("native") or "embedded" in simulations of substrates built on top of those primitives.
I think Lisp is close to the "least semantically committed substrate" you'll ever come across in practice. It's certainly not the only one, but it's a particularly clean and relatively practical one. One can say, for example, raw lambda calculus is equally uncommitted but it's kind of .. hairy. Lisp's primitives are basically the machinery of symbolic manipulation itself. It's bloody amazing.
Sorry for the verbiage. I went way overboard and meandered into foggy, mystical meadows full of mysterious entities so feel free to ignore.
Have a nice weekend!
Thank you for the reply, and I definitely agree with you on many points. I absolutely don't want to take away from Lisp that it is somehow uniquely elegant, and does have a mathematical beauty to it, this is certain.
I just feel this (and its practical ramifications) are often overexaggerated.
> I just feel this (and its practical ramifications) are often overexaggerated.
I dunno. Can't fully agree or disagree. Nominally, yes, you really don't need s-expressions and homoiconicity for creating reflective, self-hosting runtimes - live redefinition is possible in Erlang, Pharo, Ruby. Metaprogramming ergonomics - sure they are cheap in Lisps, but even Lispers try to avoid reaching there, Clojure specifically recommends thinking twice, although projects like Hyperfiddle prove macros absolutely can be very powerful. Syntax, mathematical beauty, yada-yada - that's all "poetry", much of the real world operates on tons of very ugly yet functioning code, right? So, really Lisp-shmisp, whatever, no?
In practice though, Lispers are enormously pragmatic - I'm not self-referencing here, I have worked with some. It's incredible how rapidly they can build things, prototyping on the fly. How quickly they can move between different runtimes - I've seen codebases sharing ideas between absolutely dissimilar platforms. It is inspiring how undogmatic they could be - they easily move between modes - data/code, FP/OOP, interactive/compiled, etc. They have good understanding of type systems and some even know good deal of theorem provers. For whatever reasons, Lispers are conspicuously, disproportionately effective, and this is true. Sure "citation needed" here, but this is my empirical, anecdotal observation working in different groups, using distinct language stacks for many years.
The causation probably runs through the programmer, not the program. It's not like Lisp unequivocally emits good engineers, maybe it's that a substrate with minimal syntax and maximal malleability trains a particular disposition - they treat everything as reshapeable material, distrust dogma because the language never enforced one, reach for the smallest thing that works because the language makes "the smallest thing" actually small? Maybe Lisp doesn't make anyone write better programs, it just makes it cheap to keep changing your mind? Perhaps cross-runtime fluency, undogmatism, and rapid prototyping are all just "cheap to change your mind" in a way?
Could be selection bias - maybe Lisp just attracts curious, theory-literate, undogmatic people? I don't know. What I observed is for whatever reason Lisp typically attracts older, more experienced engineers. And therefore all the "Lisp propaganda" comes from them, and demographically that's a small subset of overall community and maybe that why it often feels like overexaggerated rhetoric?