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Comment by ColinDabritz | Hacker News Reader

Regarding LISP, perhaps the perspective that does count LISP and its descendants as one ongoing evolution of a similar language family is the same perspective that will allow that lineage to last 100 years?

I feel that the systems that change over time have the best chance of weathering it.

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1960s Lisp code can still run on Common Lisp with only minimal changes -- e.g. http://elizagen.org/. A reboot like Racket or Clojure has more chance of making it alive to 2060, but I wouldn't quite rule out early Lisp yet.

It could. That might normally be considered cheating but LISP is actually designed with philosophy of customizing language itself to problem domain. Thing is, the implementations and even language features of modern LISP's are nothing like McCarthy's simplistic language and interpreter. They couldn't succeed being that due to performance and usability issues.

So, I think it's more fair to talk about LISP languages as an ongoing family but still a cheat to treat a modern one as original LISP. Probably should date it from creation of dialect or similar one.

Certainly, but the borders aren't so obvious to me. Is any language going to last 100 years without changing so much it feels 'nothing like' it's origin point?

Even if it hasn't changed in name, it may have changed in spirit. Some languages that promote themselves under very different names are substantially more similar than other cases where new language versions are dramatically different.

What 'essence' makes it the 'same language'? An interesting problem.

COBOL or Pascal if you don't use modern features lol. Idk. It's an interesting question about how we count the changes against the language's lineage. I don't have an answer to that one. We need a debate about it on StackOverflow that moderators close as "not constructive." Those are the threads that usually have great insights into issues like this haha.

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