There are some truly powerful and unique things about Lisps, but I wish articles like this would stop including REPLs and hot-reloading. The former have been table stakes for interpreted languages (and some compiled ones!) for years, and the latter is neither unique nor particularly widely used (hot reloads have to tangle with state and patching, so resetting the world for ease of reasoning is considered a best practice for a reason).

> The former have been table stakes for interpreted languages

I used to think so too back in the day when I was getting into Clojure. It was much later when I realized that when Lisp people talk about the REPL they’re usually talking not so much about the interactive CLI where you can evaluate commands easily but more so the ability to connect your program to a live session where you can quickly evaluate forms within your text editor and in the context of your running application, which enables much more interactive development than in other interpreted languages.

Largely agreed.

I do think it is worth highlighting how many advanced parts of hot-reloading have already been covered in Common Lisp. Same with highlighting how the REPL is largely not used to directly type into, but is instead a very powerful interface for tools to interact with a running image.

But, again agreed that simply these existing are not that notable today.

But with Clojure and immutable by default, hot reload is a real thing, it sounds like not just on JVM but even among lisps.