There's a perceptual litmus test here. Some people see life on earth and see God. Others see the faintest exploration of the design space, an impoverished code base that made it impossibly far. A miracle, perhaps, but not what we'd see in a billion runs of the simulation.

Same with Lisp macros. Their few variants look bolted on. We haven't begun to explore the design space, yet the best macro systems in other languages are copies of what lisp has figured out so far.

There's an 80:20 rule for language emergence. Ecosystem questions aside, a Turing-complete language needs to start by getting one thing right. APL leveraged multidimensional array handling into a general purpose language. Scripting languages gain much of their leverage from nested hash tables.

Concise versions of monadic parsing are exhilarating in their power and expressiveness. If a language was designed so parsing and manipulating itself was its sweet spot, generalizing this parsing to typed trees would be easy, and we'd invent many new programming paradigms. A general purpose language would follow.

Lisp, an implementation of the lambda calculus, is not this language. Lisp is a machine language precursor to this idea, with various macro systems bolted on.

Haskell, an implementation of typed category theory, is not this language either. At the expression level, Haskell is stuck at a few hard-wired pattern matching primitives. Haskell does not make the assumption that everyone has learned to compose arbitrary parsing operators.