dialect

>>= ` ++ :: etc. The wrong 'dialect' of Haskell leads you to believe it's Perl and APL's love child.

A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

That way you can be as lazy as you like when writing files, but not expect the rest of the world to learn your new dialect.

We would definitely jump on a Lisp dialect if it happened to have a great library we wanted to use.

For example, people from Gothenburg can't stand people from Stockholm, dialects and customs vary greatly.

Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting.

It's a side project by a couple of guys with full-time jobs, written in an experimental Lisp dialect and running on a single machine.

Occam's Razor suggests that the reason there is no dialect of Lisp as popular as less expressive languages is that no one happens to have created one yet.

There are only a few big language-project organizers, and none of them happens to have chosen to implement a language that is a dialect of Lisp.

Many people from the middle or north have trouble even understanding southerners, especially those with a rural dialect. The south also used to be part of Denmark for many hundreds of years which is partly why they have such a strange dialect.

So even if politics didn't play a role in the distinction between language and dialect, it would be hard if not impossible to come up with a universal distinction.

The second most likely explanation is almost as mundane: that the reason new dialects of Lisp have trouble attracting adherents is that mainstream programmers are put off by s-expressions.

And you realize that Oromo is highly dialectal, such that the two villages in this case speak dialects that aren't comprehensible to each other; your teacher probably doesn't know their dialect already.