> I want to like lisp for its features but the syntax is too much for me to pick up without serious time investment
There's atoms, and lists, and at the highest level of a program, the head of the list is the thing to be invoked (function, macro, special form) and the tail is a list of args. At lower levels, the higher level context says what a list means, but either a list itself or the same head/tail interpretation are the main things.
And there are some quoting constructs that control if things are bare atoms or references to the values of names, etc., and that's about it. Lisp has very little syntax. I mean, unless your main language is raw assembler or some esoteric toy like brainfuck, lisp almost certainly has much less syntax.
> are there any other languages that support for example lisp-like interactive REPL, eg analyzing program state while it is running?
There's atoms, and lists, and at the highest level of a program, the head of the list is the thing to be invoked (function, macro, special form) and the tail is a list of args. At lower levels, the higher level context says what a list means, but either a list itself or the same head/tail interpretation are the main things.
And there are some quoting constructs that control if things are bare atoms or references to the values of names, etc., and that's about it. Lisp has very little syntax. I mean, unless your main language is raw assembler or some esoteric toy like brainfuck, lisp almost certainly has much less syntax.
> are there any other languages that support for example lisp-like interactive REPL, eg analyzing program state while it is running?
Erlang.
Ruby (via Pry).
Lots of others.