Great article!

Observation: In LISP and LISP-like languages, aka Functional programming languages, parsers can be written elegantly, as combinations of simpler parsing functions...

In theory this could also be done in Imperative or Object-Oriented programming languages (other programming language paradigms) as well, but the key to the elegance seems to come from two particular language aspects:

1) The ability for functions to return lists (not specific to Functional programming languages, many languages have this ability)

2) The ability of those lists to contain unstructured asymmetric data types of individual list elements at runtime, including the ability for arbitrary individual list elements to be first class, unnamed, dynamically created functions aka "Lambda Functions" at runtime.

Any Language which supports #1 and #2 has the ability to create some very elegant parsing functions based on simpler parsing functions.

Of course, parsers with the equivalent functionality can be written in any Turing-complete programming language (which is basically every programming language!), although with slightly less (and yes, aesthetics are always in the proverbial "eye of the beholder" -- so any given individuals's personal ones may be different from any other given individual's, and probably different than mine!) elegant-looking (IMHO) code...

Anyway, great article!