Hacker News Reader

Common Lisp has a condition system and optional OOP so more incidental complexity than Clojure.

Lisps incurs significant complexity as opposed to which other simpler language?

C, Forth, you can throw Rust and C++ in there if we're talking runtime simplicity. Full-on Lisp requires a runtime that does GC, interns symbols, decodes machine words into pointers, bignums, etc. You can implement a constrained version of the language (GOAL comes to mind) that leaves some or all of these out, but you'd lose the convenience of the full Lisp and compatibility with programs written in it.

Brainfuck is even simpler than C. But a Brainfuck program is more complicated than a C program for any non-trivial computation.

While it’s fair to consider implementation complexity of the language and associated runtime or libraries, the programs produced in the language also have to be considered.

Care to qualify this at all?