This exactly. Tim Berners Lee and Roy Fielding both conceived of the web as a giant Lisp machine oriented around the URL / Hypermedia concept. HTML and the subsequent XML is a crippled form of an s-expression. If you change the tags into parens, map the functions into visual structure, you have a Lisp. TBL's first web browser in 1991 was a two-way client: you could edit the page and submit it back to the server and it would publish it. ReST is how distributed computing was meant to work in a homoiconic language. And JSON? C'mon, change the colon, bang, it's a Lisp. Lisp is fundamental; the AST is the avatar of all languages.