*Sigh*

While I'm happy to see John Carmack using a Lisp, you're missing the point. If 
you offer Lisp as a "scripting language" you'll fail to show off why *exactly* 
it's better. S-expressions shine because they save you from the entirely 
mechanical task of parsing. There are emergent properties of this notational 
scheme that are also lovely in their own right e.g., macros & extensibility via 
incremental compilation, but all of this originates in the notation.

If you build up a scripting language in which you pass around shader strings 
and whatever random formats happen into your program, you're going to destroy 
the underlying "lispyness" because anyone who wants to make a change to the 
implementation will have to understand the format in its entirety, or be forced 
to guess at the semantics implied by so-and-so syntax - at which point, what 
has Lisp gotten me? Sure, you'll have macros for the "high level language", but 
they're not magic. The reason that e.g., the Symbolics Lisp machine is so 
fondly remembered was because of the "crystalline pyramid of comprehensible 
mutually-interlocking concepts" (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42) which allowed a 
user not intimately familiar with the machine or its architecture to make 
meaningful changes.

"Lisping" without addressing the underling problems of OpenGL etc. is an absurd 
exercise. Even if this stunt were to make you personally a billon dollars, 
you'll end up unable to buy anything interesting because everyone's time is 
being spent ferrying around magic strings (where we are today).

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