JavaScript has been called "Lisp in C's clothing". What it lacks is macros basically but you can get a lot of practical work done in JavaScript and it is as mainstream as it gets. So how about a JavaScript OS/Machine/Hardware anybody?
No, it lacks a lot of things in comparison, and if it only lacks macros, then it's lacking a lot as well.
Considering, for this case, "Lisp"="Common Lisp", this is what Javascript lacks:
1. Strong typing. CL is very strongly typed. Javascript is very weakly typed. Typescript doesn't fix this 100% because the runtime is still javascript, and thus the running code is weakly typed.
2. Code should be a first class citizen; code can be processed/sliced/diced/handled as easily as data. That is, code is data so most of the functions that apply to data, also apply to code. This doesn't happen in Javascript. Thus in Lisp metaprogramming is very easy and can be applied in many ways, greatly enhancing the power of the language, making it a "programmable programming language."
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I could stop here, because these two above are strong, significant differences enough to tip the balance towards CL. But there's more:
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3. A really good object system. CLOS might be the most advanced OOP system out there.
4. Really good numeric support. Javascript numbers are internally floats. In CL you have a full numeric tower. Complex numbers? check. Arbitrary-length numbers? check.
5. Image-based interactive development
6. A killer exception handling system: The condition-restart system.
7. Speed. CL can execute significantly faster than JS and can approach C/Fortran speeds if needed (by using tricks.)
8. Optional static type checks, and type declarations for increased performance if needed.
9. In javascript, you code so you define what happens at runtime. In CL, you can define when is your code going to be run: "at read time" versus "at compile time" versus "at runtime". So there are three "times" you can leverage!!
There are even more differences, to be honest.
One question, you say "CL is very strongly typed". Then you also say "Optional type checks". Are you saying CL is optionally very strongly typed?
Note that I wrote "optional static type checks".
CL is always strongly typed. A character array, for example, stays as a character array. It can't be used directly in place of a byte array, for example.
But what it allows, optionally, are type declarations. These, in implementations like SBCL, allow compile-time ("static") type checking.
The declarations also allow big enhancements in code speed, because this produces code that is specific to a data type (you can always see the compiled assembly code for a lisp function by using the "disassemble" function)
I wonder what'd have happened had he done so. Would it have grown to the size that JavaScript is at today, or would it have lost to something similar to JavaScript that some other browser would have implemented?
"The immediate concern at Netscape was it must look like Java. People have done Algol-like syntaxes for Lisp but I didn't have time to take a Scheme core so I ended up doing it all directly and that meant I could make the same mistakes that others make."
http://bryanpendleton.blogspot.com/2009/11/coders-at-work-br...
Please, no.