On Lisp

Of course, it's feature complete!

Common Lisp is its own standard library. Here are its contents: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm

It's got a whopping 980 functions for all your needs with intuitive and easy to remember names like least-negative-normalized-double-float, update-instance-for-redefined-class, load-logical-pathname-translations, simple-condition-format-arguments, internal-time-units-per-second, pprint-exit-if-list-exhausted and so on. Of course, it purposefully lacks the negligible nonsense like a graphical toolkit, image processing, nonblocking asynchronous IO, remoting, cryptography, SQL, text processing, archive tools, concurrency, parallelism, thread-safe data structures, monitoring & management, printing support, sound and processing, XML toolkits - all of that is useless, after all! The most important thing is that you get to use anaphoric lambdas and pandoric captures whilst munching on momma's tasty soup!

Seriously, you say "a core library" as if Lisp is a practical general-purpose PL. It's a lie. Lisp is no such thing, hence such a short stub in place of a core library and a trashpile of unmaintained cruftworks from fanboy-soup-eaters (a.k.a. CLiki). Look at the core libs of industrial-strength languages like Java or Python. They were forged in the fires of practical problem-solving over many years. While the Lispers have spent the whole 50 years of their totem's existence forging only one thing: their self-aggrandizement.

Although, to do Lisp justice, it should be noted that Franz and Allegro did crank out their bicycle-crutch-ersatz-"core" libraries. This is because during lisp-hype of the 80-90ies these gescheftmachers have managed to get several rich yet clueless Pinocchios addicted to the Lisp drug. Like Boeing, for example. And when the Pinocchios started trying to solve real problems lispishly, they had to hurriedly plug that gaping hole. So go ahead and spend some $4500 for a real Lisp - it's an easy sum for a Lisper, right? - and welcome to the miraculous world of Professional Lisp Pinocchios.

>>12

Last thought on this whole s-expression and syntax thing:

There exist two things called a "structure editor" (unfortunately two things. In the Lisp world it always meant one and one thing only, till a bunch of not very intelligent people encountering some language loosely related to Lisp (e.g. Clojure or Scheme) and hearing about the concept elsewhere decided to pollute the Lisp meaning in the context of Lisp, thus confusing newbies everywhere. Worst of all the two meanings are regularly conflated into a nonsensival meaning almost everywhere)

Anyway the first (foreign) meaning of "structure editing" or "strucucture editor" an interface to editing some representation of a program in a structured way e.g. Paredit in Emacs or Blockly.

The second (native) meaning is editing program objects (i.e Lisp forms) directly sans reader (i.e. sans text, sans files) IN MEMORY in a running Lisp image. This says nothing about the interface for doing so.

Interlisp pioneered this. Keyboard keystrokes would directly change the program objects as they were in memory; the resulting program was continuously being reprinted with a pretty printer. All clients of that program would immediately use the new updated program as it was at every keypress: This is part of the reason why Xerox D machines were known as voodoo boxes.

Many Lispers have claimed that Common Lisp's acknowledgement of the file abstraction has been a mistake. I fall into this camp.

Anyway the point is that for both meanings of "structure editor" s-expressions are very very very useful. So this is another reason why Lispers like s-expressions.