What Makes LISP Unique?

Exploring the homoiconicity feature of LISP and how it makes LISP more of a language for languages

Erik Engheim
ITNEXT
Published in
9 min readSep 28, 2022

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Alien LISP mascot by Conrad Barski, M.D.
Alien LISP mascot by Conrad Barski, M.D.

The LISP programming language and its derivatives, such as Scheme and Clojure, have a feature that has long fascinated me, referred to as homoiconicity.

It implies that code is represented as data in LISP, and thus can be manipulated…

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Geek dad, living in Oslo, Norway with passion for UX, Julia programming, science, teaching, reading and writing.