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Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

janet-lang.org

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Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#171

Post by mr_custard »

orthoxerox wrote: post #141
moron4hire wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft doesn't make breaking changes. I have code that has survived three or four of your supposed cycles that still runs completely fine.

Microsoft did kill off or sunset some parts of the Framework. WCF, WWF, AppDomain, expression trees, dynamic, VB. People who wrote WCF services in VB for a living are probably extremely disappointed.

Disappointed? Not at all! I worked with it many years ago.

Whilst WCF made some notable improvements over what existed within the ecosystem before it, it was still a sprawling, complex PITA and full of developer friction. Killing it off in this case was definitely the right thing to do :-)

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#172

Post by fluffything »

NotPhysicsPhd wrote: post #76
thih9 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This process might seem easy for you, but maybe not for people installing Clojure for the first time. In an extreme case, someone who doesn't know Java ecosystem might want to stop to research: what is JVM, why is it necessary, which version would be the best, what's the difference between Oracle's Java and OpenJDK, etc...

One could say the same for a plethora of programming languages some research is needed and we don't have to resort to extreme cases. Out of the top of my head: - There is the Python 2.7/3.X situation still going on, then there are the several distributions of python. - GNU's R has a similar problem - Installing gcc on windows was (perhaps still is) a confusing mess for a newcomer. IMO I did not find installing clojur…

The user above mentioned that for _them_ the installation experience of a programming language matters a lot, and that they found the installation experience of Janet superior to Clojure.

You might not share that users preference of caring about the installation experience of a PL, but arguing that this user's preference is somehow unfair because many other languages also have bad installation experiences makes absolutely no sense.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#173

Post by cmiles74 »

e12e wrote: post #163
cmiles74 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows story for Clojure is disappointingly weak, especially if you are going by the "Getting Started" section on their website.[0] They have reasonable instructions for Linux and MacOS, but for Windows they point you to an "alpha" level tool. I think this is especially disappointing because there are mature, cross platform solutions available but whoever manages the Clojure project seems hell bent on pushing th…

At least lein and boot-clj is available for/via scoop.sh. Seems a bit of a missed opportunity that "official" clojure "clj" isn't just using scoop.

Agreed, the Scoop instructions are simpler and many developers will already have it installed.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#174

Post by desiderantes »

kerkeslager wrote: post #166
playing_colours wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Janet's purported focus is that it's easy to embed in a larger C program. There is Guile https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/ that is an implementation of Schema with the focus on being an extension language that integrates with C and C++. Wouldn't it more practical to adopt and contribute to it, rather than invent an own wheel?

I'm in no way associated with Janet, so I can't answer for them. But as someone who is implementing their own language which shares a lot of goals with Guile, the reason I didn't contribute to Guile is that Guile is an implementation of the Scheme Standard, and it bound at least loosely to that. Certain modern features just aren't compatible and might not be accepted if you go through the effort of implementing them.…

Guile is more than a Scheme implementation. You can implement a completely new language for it (somebody recently did Python) and reuse their embedding capabilities. Guile comes with an Ecmascript implementation, just to show that it can be done.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#175

Post by Stratoscope »

kleiba wrote: post #23

Okay, so when Clojure came along, it came with a strong underlying philosophy of what the language was supposed to be/do. Among them were design decisions such as, e.g.,: - VMs, not OSes, are the platforms of the future, so target the JVM - Object Orientation is overrated, but polymorphism is a good thing - Multi-core is here to stay, so use immutable data structures to greatly facilitate writing correct concurrent p…

Mobile-readable version of your list of Clojure design decisions:

- VMs, not OSes, are the platforms of the future, so target the JVM

- Object Orientation is overrated, but polymorphism is a good thing

- Multi-core is here to stay, so use immutable data structures to greatly facilitate writing correct concurrent programs

- Leverage the strengths of LISP but give it a modern overhaul (most notably, throw in different parenthesis)

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#176

Post by catalogia »

Koshkin wrote: post #85
mapcars wrote: post #4

2020: a programming language is named Janet; a child is named X Æ A-12. How did we come to this.

Names starting with a ‘j’ should be reserved for languages targeting JVM.

I'm sure Oracle would love that, but fuck Oracle.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#177

Post by [deleted] »

adamkl wrote: post #106
galfarragem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I like in Janet (I'm just a noob so take this comment with a grain of salt as it will sound superficial): - Easy to get started: one click install, great website and concise docs. No matter what some people say, getting started in Clojure is a nightmare. - Lightweight and fresh. No JVM, no Node. - Freedom and expressivity. Mutable or immutable data structures, ultimately is up to me. It might bite me down the ro…

I've posted this quote before, but it might help explain why making Clojure easier to get into maybe hasn't been a priority for Hickey et al. So we need players. I would rant here, but I won't. But look at this guitar player with blisters. A harpist has blisters, a base player with blisters. There's this barrier to overcome for every musician. Imagine if you downloaded something from GitHub and it gave you blisters.…

[deleted]

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#178

Post by mr_custard »

Many people seem to be comparing Janet and Clojure here as if one had to choose to use only one or the other.

Most of my daily work is done in Clojure or ClojureScript and that will continue to be true. However, I am excited by what I've seen in Janet and I'm already thinking that I'd love to call this from bash scripts to do system tasks (devops for example) that don't need the JVM cranked up.

I'm choosing both :-)

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#179

Post by dleslie »

I'm not really clear why I would use this and not one of the small embedded Schemes that have srfi-18 support.

Chibi and S7 are both "drop some C into your project" levels of trivial to get running, and reasonably zippy.

And there's an upgrade path by using the standard: you can move to Chicken, Gambit, Guile, Racket or Chez and keep your code.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#180

Post by dleslie »

lispm wrote: post #39
oblio wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if his question was not rhetorical, as in: It is really Lisp if it doesn't have cons?

Is it really Lisp without 'lists'? https://janet-lang.org/api/index.html that does not mention list in meaningful ways. It seems to prefer to work with other data structures (like arrays) - which is okay, but then I won't call it a List Processor dialect.

I would say no: without list processing it's not really a lisp. It's something that looks like a lisp, but isn't.
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