It's things like this that remind me that Lisp(s) are really the best languages for taking advantage of the idea of Turing completeness. In terms of ease of implementation that is. I think that really, this is what we mean by "powerful" languages - how easily can you take advantage of the principle of completeness to do anything in your chosen language.
You often hear people using the idea of completeness to say that their favourite language can, of course, do anything. But in reality some languages just aren't very well suited to it, or would require some horrendous amount of coding and abstractions (Greenspuns Tenth rule comes to mind [1]).
So whenever some new idea in programming becomes popular, whether it's pattern matching [2], concurrency [3], or even the web (HN), you can always rest easy because someone will be able to quite quickly write that functionality into Lisp itself. The only difficulty is in finding out about the libraries in the first place!
You often hear people using the idea of completeness to say that their favourite language can, of course, do anything. But in reality some languages just aren't very well suited to it, or would require some horrendous amount of coding and abstractions (Greenspuns Tenth rule comes to mind [1]).
So whenever some new idea in programming becomes popular, whether it's pattern matching [2], concurrency [3], or even the web (HN), you can always rest easy because someone will be able to quite quickly write that functionality into Lisp itself. The only difficulty is in finding out about the libraries in the first place!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule [2] https://github.com/m2ym/optima [3] http://lparallel.org/