IMO saying julia is literally a lisp is just not worth the type of discussion it generates. I'd much prefer to say the important part: Julia learned a ton of very important lessons from the lisp family of languages, and has integrated a lot of them.
The parser and lowering passes were in femtolisp, and yes Jeff wrote femtolisp.
However, There's now a pure julia implementation of the parser that's on by default, and the julia implementation of lowering is also almost done and ready to replace the femtolisp one.
But honestly, these things aren't really what I mean when I say julia is lispy, those are just easter eggs. I more mean the language design and semantics.
