Lisp, the original high-level language, introduced a long list of features common in languages today, including dynamic typing, interpretation, and garbage collection. The original Lisp language is long gone, but it had many imitators, which we call 'dialects' of Lisp. Clojure, introduced in 2007, is the first Lisp dialect to gain wide usage in three decades.
Though Lisp features have been co-opted by many other languages, what still distinguishes Lisp dialects from all other languages is how Lisp dialects translate source code into running programs. In non-Lisp languages, the code translation process has two primary steps:
- lexing (a.k.a. tokenization) and parsing
- code generation (compilation or interpretation)