Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
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Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#2This is just perfection on first glance, exactly what I've been looking for to augment my Rust projects that need a command/configuration language. And with a working repl, too, apparently.
I hope the second and third glances will be good too.
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#3Helix Editor plans to use Steel as a plugin language [0].
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#4When I tried to introduce s-expressions to a DSL my co-workers nearly lynched me. The parenthesis were so violently hated I sunk into a deep hole and still haven’t came back out of it.
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#5I want this to succeed!! please do not let the word "srfi" ever appear in the packages list...naming libraries with obscure numbers no one remembers was a terrible terrible idea that all schemes seem to perpetuate
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#6When I tried to introduce s-expressions to a DSL my co-workers nearly lynched me. The parenthesis were so violently hated I sunk into a deep hole and still haven’t came back out of it.
It is really fun (sad) to see this, I've seen it so many times myself too. You show how something would be with s-expressions, compared to something, and all they can focus on is how many parenthesis there are. But when you sit down and count, they're the same amount as the code was when it wasn't s-expressions, just in different locations. And when you remove the parenthesis, they can kind of understand the code, kind of.
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#7When I tried to introduce s-expressions to a DSL my co-workers nearly lynched me. The parenthesis were so violently hated I sunk into a deep hole and still haven’t came back out of it.
It is really fun (sad) to see this, I've seen it so many times myself too. You show how something would be with s-expressions, compared to something, and all they can focus on is how many parenthesis there are. But when you sit down and count, they're the same amount as the code was when it wasn't s-expressions, just in different locations. And when you remove the parenthesis, they can kind of understand the code, ki…
One option that might be suitable for a DSL, is implicit parens based on whitespace. A newline opens a new paren, and the paren closes when it reaches another line with the same indentation e.g:
(defun factorial (x)
(if (zerop x)
1
(* x (factorial (- x 1)))))
defun factorial (x)
if (zerop x)
1
* x (factorial (- x 1))Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#8When I tried to introduce s-expressions to a DSL my co-workers nearly lynched me. The parenthesis were so violently hated I sunk into a deep hole and still haven’t came back out of it.
It really is kind of frustrating isn't it? Because anyone who's put any real effort into learning Lisp knows that the parentheses are not what's hard to understand, actually. You don't even have to read them, really.
So when people complain loudly about parentheses in Lisp that just tells me they probably never made any real effort to learn it, and are actively opposed to trying.
It's not a productive starting point for a discussion.
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#9When I tried to introduce s-expressions to a DSL my co-workers nearly lynched me. The parenthesis were so violently hated I sunk into a deep hole and still haven’t came back out of it.
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Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#10When I tried to introduce s-expressions to a DSL my co-workers nearly lynched me. The parenthesis were so violently hated I sunk into a deep hole and still haven’t came back out of it.
I did it once in an internal UI because we needed to rapidly expose some functionality that could be composed/piped in complex ways and it would take a while to implement a normal UI
Was met with skepticism, esp around the engineering/maintenance overhead, until I told them the parser took me a couple hours to write and was only a hundred lines of code or so