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> If I had to choose a language that is furthest from Perl, it might be Lisp.

The two languages I enjoy the most are Perl and Lisp - and the majority of my non-work related coding is split between those two.

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Given that Matz considers both Perl and Lisp an influence, what's your take on Ruby? If homoiconicity is something you care about it's probably dissatisfying, but it's got a lot of very functional aspects at the same time.

"Ruby is the love child of Lisp and Smalltalk, raised by Perl the eccentric nanny" - Josh Susser

Indeed Perl has true lambdas and full closures and has for many many years. There’s no GIL. It supports multi-process programming, event-driven programming, and multithreading. It has optional objects. Code can be, but doesn’t have to be, written in prefix with surrounding parentheses. It can feel very natural for people coming from some form of Lisp.

Unfortunately it doesn’t do automatic tail call elimination but that’s a tooling limitation more than a language limitation.

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