Words are called 'symbols' in Lisp. Making extremely expressive domain level constructs is reducing the code size a lot in larger Lisp programs.
> Lisp is not a particularly declarative type of language
Just the opposite. Lisp is one of the major tools to write declarative code. The declarations are a part of the running system and can be queried&changed while the program is running.
> Lisp ... all win contests for fewest characters,
Most Lisp since the end 70s don't care about character count. Lisp usually uses very descriptive symbols as operator names. Lisp users invented machines with larger memory sizes in the late 70s, to get rid of limitations in code and data size.
Paul Graham is favoring low-character count code, but this is not representative for general Lisp code, which favors low-symbol count code through expressive constructs.
> understand this domain specific language without executing the code
the languages will be documented and will be operators in the language. Other programming languages also create large vocabularities, but in different ways. Lisp makes it easy to integrate syntactic abstractions in the software, without the need to write external languages, which many other systems need to do.
For example one can see the Common Lisp Object System as a domain-specific extension to write object-oriented code in Lisp. It's constructs are well documented and widely use in Lisp.
> it/is firmly routed in the terminal/console era...
Words are called 'symbols' in Lisp. Making extremely expressive domain level constructs is reducing the code size a lot in larger Lisp programs.
> Lisp is not a particularly declarative type of language
Just the opposite. Lisp is one of the major tools to write declarative code. The declarations are a part of the running system and can be queried&changed while the program is running.
> Lisp ... all win contests for fewest characters,
Most Lisp since the end 70s don't care about character count. Lisp usually uses very descriptive symbols as operator names. Lisp users invented machines with larger memory sizes in the late 70s, to get rid of limitations in code and data size.
Paul Graham is favoring low-character count code, but this is not representative for general Lisp code, which favors low-symbol count code through expressive constructs.
> understand this domain specific language without executing the code
the languages will be documented and will be operators in the language. Other programming languages also create large vocabularities, but in different ways. Lisp makes it easy to integrate syntactic abstractions in the software, without the need to write external languages, which many other systems need to do.
For example one can see the Common Lisp Object System as a domain-specific extension to write object-oriented code in Lisp. It's constructs are well documented and widely use in Lisp.
> it/is firmly routed in the terminal/console era...
Use of a Lisp Machine in the 80s:
https://youtu.be/gV5obrYaogU
Interactive graphical systems were early used in Lisp since the 70s. There is a long tradition of graphical systems written in Lisp.
For example PTC sells a 3d design system written with a C++ kernel and a few million lines of Lisp code:
https://www.ptc.com/-/media/Files/PDFs/CAD/Creo/creo-element...