I am curious to know the relationship between a language I program in and another, older, language which influenced it. There is no specific aspect I'm interested in, it's more that I am interested to learn how the language I came to know was influenced by the one that came before it.
Would such a question be on topic here?
In case it matters, the languages are R and Lisp.
I think the issue with such kind of question wouldn't be topicality. If you just ask it literally, I would expect the question to be closed as too broad (a.k.a. "needs more focus"). Askers on this site are expected to show serious research effort before they post a question, tell what they found and why it did not meet they needs (see "Why is research important?" for the reasons behind this). Our community does not like it when someone just tries to pass a research task to them, especially a research task one could have done by themselves using Wikipedia and Google.
What you could try instead is to start with the available sources about the origins of R (for example, using Wikipedia and the resources mentioned there), then check what you can find out about the connection to Lisp. When asking your question, you should tell us why you think there is a connection between the two languages, and where you see a missing link. That still isn't a guarantee the question to survive, but it should increase the chances for the question to get accepted.
