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Yeah I just think when a language never has to go back and invent new syntax and junk to keep up, it’s probably doing something right.

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Lisp got a lot of things right and modern languages have borrowed a lot of ideas that were pioneered in various Lisps. But nobody has borrowed s-expression syntax and I don't think that's an accident.

I don't think that's true -- we're discussing a language that was invented relatively recently and has sexpressions. It's just that if a language has lots of parentheses, it gets classified as a lisp.

As soon as a language borrows s-expressions, it's a Lisp. This makes it impossible in practice for a non-Lisp to just "borrow" s-expressions. Definitely not an accident.

On the other hand, you do have languages like XML which is basically a much more cumbersome syntax for s-expressions.

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