I find this to be unnecessarily prescriptive, as are almost all purely semantic assertions about what should be (semantic used in its weak, normal language sense here). It is certainly true that Schemes and Clojures and Adders and Emacs Lisps and so on differ in many respects from "Common Lisp" but that hardly justifies fixing the label "Lisp" to refer only to Common Lisp. I mean _Emacs Lisp_ contains Lisp in its name! Would you claim Emacs Lisp is not a lisp?<p>It remains that these languages have more in common with one another they they have in common with, say, Ada or Standard ML, but even were it not the case, so long as a listener understands what a speaker means when they refer to a language as being "a lisp," I see no problem with the continued usage. Language works when it allows communication, and as long as a word clearly denotes a concept in common parlance, it hardly needs to be dictatorially controlled. If people were referring to Clojure as a "Common Lisp," it would be useful to correct them, but this is not the case.<p>Vague language can even be enlightening, as it forms the nucleating body for useful discussions. For instance, one might pose the question "Is Ruby an Acceptable Lisp?", and while the answer is obviously, stridently, hilariously, no, the discussion will help illuminate what both terms mean.<p>So I favor letting language do its job, and letting lisp continue to refer, as an improper noun, to a cloud of languages sharing a family resemblance.
For me the word Lisp means the very simple abstract language that McCarthy designed (no implementation details etc). Common Lisp took those concepts, added many more of its own and became a standard. Scheme and Clojure took the same approach, take the very basic elements of Lisp and add their own concepts on top of it. So, calling Common Lisp the only Lisp just doesn't make any sense at all.
What has the author exactly achieved compared to, say, pg or Rich Hickey?<p>Here's an answer from Rich Hickey about the type of person such as the author of TFA:<p><i>Q: What would you say to people who claim that Clojure is not a “real Lisp”?<p>Hickey: Life is too short to spend time on such people. Plenty of Lisp experts have recognized Clojure as a Lisp. I don’t expect everyone to prefer Clojure over their favorite Lisp.</i><p>We understand you, author. You love your CL and you think it's the one true Lisp dialect. Good. We have no time to waste with you ; )