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The Janet Language

janet-lang.org

51–60 of 203 posts

Re: The Janet Language

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel the need to say it every time I see new lisp-like language. Normal people don't like lisp, it looks weird. So? Normal people aren’t computing enthusiasts, so... > Are lisp-like language designers aware of that? No, lisp-like language designers have never hears the parenphobes that jump into every discussion of lisp-like languages to make their feelings known. Also, no one involved in Python, YAML, etc., has…

> So? Normal people aren’t computing enthusiasts, so... even many (most?) computing enthusiasts aren’t into lisp. I am. Since this language is lisp-y but not deeply lisp, you’re now finding that not only are anti-lispers put off, but also lispers.

Would you also say that musicians should only create and perform popular music?

Re: The Janet Language

#53
post #30

So this is kind of like a lightweight non-jvm clojure? I like it. Looks like it could be a nice swiss army knife for data munging.

You mean Python, not Clojure. A number of key underpinnings, such as (almost) exclusively immutable datastructures are missing from this language. It is more of a Python with a LISP syntax.

Or python with clojure syntax?

The author also wrote fennel, a lisp/clojure-ish wrapper for lua, so I think that's the influence.

Re: The Janet Language

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel the need to say it every time I see new lisp-like language. Normal people don't like lisp, it looks weird. So? Normal people aren’t computing enthusiasts, so... > Are lisp-like language designers aware of that? No, lisp-like language designers have never hears the parenphobes that jump into every discussion of lisp-like languages to make their feelings known. Also, no one involved in Python, YAML, etc., has…

vaguely kinda related. I want to like lisp for its features but the syntax is too much for me to pick up without serious time investment, which I am not sure I want to make. are there any other languages that support for example lisp-like interactive REPL, eg analyzing program state while it is running?

Lisp syntax is a lack of syntax, it takes five minutes to learn. Everything being an expression, expressions being replaceable by their evaluation, quote/unquote/quasiquote, macros is what'll take time to adapt to.

Conveniently analysing program state while it's running is more a feature of languages that run in an image than something lisplikes have in common, like Common Lisp, Factor and Pharo, but not Racket or Guile.

Re: The Janet Language

#55
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So? Normal people aren’t computing enthusiasts, so... even many (most?) computing enthusiasts aren’t into lisp. I am. Since this language is lisp-y but not deeply lisp, you’re now finding that not only are anti-lispers put off, but also lispers.

Would you also say that musicians should only create and perform popular music?

absolutely not! people should do whatever they want but if you’re going to make atonal music in a non-traditional scale, you shouldn’t be surprised if you have a limited audience.

Re: The Janet Language

#57
post #18

[flagged]

Well, projects like Wisp* or Readable** exist, but the people who use Lisp tend to prefer S-expressions, so those projects don't gain a lot of mindshare.

It's kinda like M-expressions, a "normal" syntax gets proposed, but Lisp hackers prefer S-expressions, so the new syntax just kind of founders.

* https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-119/srfi-119.html

** https://readable.sourceforge.io/

Re: The Janet Language

#58
post #42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normal people don't like lisp, it looks weird. Have you considered that this is perhaps not a problem with lisp? Normal people do not much like writing computer programs at all.

The empirical evident would be against you, as tens of millions of programmers prefer writing code in those other languages that lack the parent :-)

They may or may not. I prefer lisp, but I mostly program in TypeScript and Go. My theory is that if most programmers tried lisp for a month or two, they’d end up preferring it.

Re: The Janet Language

#59

I love Lisp (particularly Scheme), and heard that Janet was strongly inspired by Lisp and is "really Lisp underneath", but is really fast and strong at math, so I thought I'd give it a try, and after learning it I started wondering to myself, "why am I not simply using Lisp?" Though arguably lispy, Janet just wasn't lispy enough for me. It was missing the simple, elegant sexp syntax I dearly loved, and I started to w…

>It was missing the simple, elegant sexp syntax I dearly love

In what sense does Janet not have sexp syntax? Seems plenty sexpy to me. Purists seem to say it's not a lisp because its underlying data structure is not (cons-based) lists as in classical lisp, but I don't see what syntactic difference there is.

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