You make an interesting and important point, but to be honest the article's intended audience is people who are intimidated by language translation or just have never done it before. The "Minilisp" is not really a language so much as a tool to demonstrate the concepts of tokenizing, parsing and recursion. It is unfortunate if the result is a mischaracterization of real Lisp, but I was trying to cut a balance between being accurate and filling the article with tangential information.
That's a fine goal, but there's more at stake here than mere "accuracy". When you design a language that uses S-expression syntax (sort of) and has "Lisp" in its name, but eliminates the reason for using S-expressions, you're not really laying a foundation for understanding, you're creating a cargo cult (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Metaphorical_uses_o...)
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You make an interesting and important point, but to be honest the article's intended audience is people who are intimidated by language translation or just have never done it before. The "Minilisp" is not really a language so much as a tool to demonstrate the concepts of tokenizing, parsing and recursion. It is unfortunate if the result is a mischaracterization of real Lisp, but I was trying to cut a balance between being accurate and filling the article with tangential information.
That's a fine goal, but there's more at stake here than mere "accuracy". When you design a language that uses S-expression syntax (sort of) and has "Lisp" in its name, but eliminates the reason for using S-expressions, you're not really laying a foundation for understanding, you're creating a cargo cult (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Metaphorical_uses_o...)