Not only does it have full-on raging macros, you can redefine the languages own syntax inline. Check out one of Larry's recent talks about STD.pm (here's a Google Tech Talk from last year, which is nowhere near as funny as Larry usually is, but is still quite informative: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzIWdJVP-wo )for a real "when you see it, you'll shit bricks" moment. Perl 6 is far more intimidating than I ever realized. They seem to have looked at everything good about Perl (and a handful of other languages) and said, "Let's do a lot more of that." It's somewhat scary how much more of "that" they've done. So, there's macros from Lisp, lazy evaluation from Haskell, redefine-able grammar and syntax from I dunno where, a new regex language, etc. It takes TMTOWTDI to obscene new heights (kinda like Lisp). If power is the sole determining factor in what language you choose, there's a strong case to be made that Perl 6 is the one you want. I don't know that I entirely buy that (if I did, I guess I'd be using Lisp), but I'm hopeful that the real result of Perl 6 will be a language as capable as Lisp with a community and library culture as strong as Perl 5.

To take most everything good existing and sum it, is how you make Perls. :-) I'm not arguing here, I do Perl today.

You should have put the content of the last sentence first; too few will read it.

For example, if you're typically a lisp guy, you would probably write code like this: (init (alloc ApplicationDelegate))

But if you're an ObjC person, you'd do this: ((ApplicationDelegate alloc) init))

And strangely, if you replaced the parentheses with normal square brackets, you'd be looking at syntactically correct ObjC code! In Nu you can mix and match your sexprs and algol-like notations as long as you know what you're doing. The finished code would be something a lisp developer and ObjC developer could both understand without knowing too much of the underlying details.

Interesting idea to level a scripting language on using the message passing mechanism of Obj-C -- and so integrate the resulting code with the compiled Obj-C!

Thanks for making me look!

Yes, but, I'm sorry, not every computer science advance came from Lisp. (Not singling you out in particular, berntb.) Insisting otherwise makes one sound condescending, fanatic, and/or naive. There are good ideas in Lisp, yes, but there are also good ideas in ML, Lua, Awk, SQL, Smalltalk, Prolog, Haskell, SNOBOL, etc.

Lisp is cool as a clean embodiment of the Lambda calculus and all, but if people stopped treating it like it were a divine revelation, other people would perhaps stop getting the impression that Lisp users are [insert torrent of unflattering adjectives].

(The Scheme community is generally much better about this than the Common Lisp community, but the Scheme community at large also seems to spend more time trying to actually move the language forward rather than insisting that some old standard has everything people will ever need.)

AFAIK, not even the lisp snobs would argue that everything worthwhile happened in lisp; they argue that most of the lisp characteristics was copied by everyone. For some values of "most", it seems like a very good argument.

Just, it boggles my mind how many ideas from barely ten years ago seem completely unfamiliar to most programmers. As Steve Yegge put it, "Oh, right, I keep forgetting: you were born in nineteen-ninety something, and you're nineteen, and I'm ninety-something."

I'm only 27, but I'm starting to feel like I'm at least one programmer-generation back (and, occasionally, the cranky old man yelling, "get off my lawn!"). I find a lot of inspiration in the 70s-80s Unix-era books, for example. While some of the surface details have changed, those guys wrote lucidly about ways to design useful systems without them growing into impossibly tangled monstrosities (even before C++...). A lot of issues programmers struggle with today have been mulled over for decades, and there's a lot of good advice if you look. The field hasn't changed that much.

I see ideas that keep getting rediscovered, and sometimes it's really sad how few stick. Lisp had a lot of great ideas in it, yes, but it's not the only old language that did, and the way it gets exalted that way touches a nerve of mine sometimes. (FWIW, the second paragraph in my response above was saved right as the edit window closed. I was still rewriting it, and it sounds harsher than I would have kept.)

And then...

Be happy kid, it gets worse. :-)

Exercise, take vacations and make certain you relax enough (a meditation-course is good; there are non-religious ones). Also, be careful with your teeth; an infection I had no other effects of, made me chronically tired for a long time and really destroyed my life (I thought I had burned out).

And work with stuff you care about, otherwise you'll probably hate yourself and everyone else.

Most other stuff you seem to know.

Sorry for that, but a 20-something trying to sound world weary needs a pat on the head. :-)