title: Is ECMAScript really a dialect of Lisp?
body: <p>A friend of mine drew my attention the welcome message of <a href="http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/" rel="noreferrer">4th European Lisp Symposium</a>:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>... implementation and application of
    any of the Lisp dialects, including
    Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp,
    AutoLisp, ISLISP, Dylan, Clojure,
    ACL2, <strong>ECMAScript</strong>, ...</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>and then asked if ECMAScript is really a dialect of Lisp. Can it really be considered so? Why?</p>
  
  <p>Is there a well defined and clear-cut set of criteria to help us detect whether a language is a dialect of Lisp? Or is being a dialect taken in a very loose sense (and in that case can we add Python, Perl, Haskell, etc. to the list of Lisp dialects?) </p>