At ILC 2002 former Lisp giant now Python advocate Peter Norvig was for some reason allowed to give the keynote address like Martin Luther leading Easter Sunday mass at the Vatican and pitching Protestantism because in his talk Peter bravely repeated his claim that Python is a Lisp.
When he finished Peter took questions and to my surprise called first on the rumpled old guy who had wandered in just before the talk began and eased himself into a chair just across the aisle from me and a few rows up.
This guy had wild white hair and a scraggly white beard and looked hopelessly lost as if he had gotten separated from the tour group and wandered in mostly to rest his feet and just a little to see what we were all up to. My first thought was that he would be terribly disappointed by our bizarre topic and my second thought was that he would be about the right age, Stanford is just down the road, I think he is still at Stanford -- could it be?
"Yes, John?" Peter said.
I won't pretend to remember Lisp inventor John McCarthy's exact words which is odd because there were only about ten but he simply asked if Python could gracefully manipulate Python code as data.
"No, John, it can't," said Peter and nothing more, graciously assenting to the professor's critique, and McCarthy said no more though Peter waited a moment to see if he would and in the silence a thousand words were said.
0: http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/2008/02/ooh-ooh-my-turn-wh...
If you also look at the pseudocode or the python code, it's not very Lispy. Python more or less is used on a level of an object-oriented BASIC.
In the above answer to a question in Quora, he seems to suggest that most of the features in lisp eventually got adopted in most other mainstream languages. Or in other words the concept of 'acceptable lisp'.
I get what you are saying, and I feel the same way. But I think what people try to imply here- If you are using Lisp for a certain set of features, most of them are now available else where.
But not in the same language and/or less well integrated.
Example: mostly no popular language has flexible macros as tightly integrated in the language as Lisp has. Those who have macros, either have a different view on macros and/or have them as preprocessing steps.
You find very few languages with generic functions. There are lots of attempts to add them to languages like Java, but they are mostly experiments and not used.
Similar for Common Lisp exception handling mechanism. Very few language have that.
More direct influence languages like PERL6, Julia, R etc. look and feel very different from Common Lisp.
Even if you think language have features like Clojure has a REPL - but it lacks the Lisp interpreter, the integrated error handling, the break loops, ...
It's not the number of components, it's the integration. You can bolt wings to a ship, but the thing won't fly well.
Also we tend to prefer Perl 6 to be spelled with a non-breaking space before the 6. [U+A0]
Perl 6 has features from many sources, so it is indeed a departure from Lisp.