31–40 of 292 posts
This post is refreshing - smells of the pre AI discussions on the internet. A new language, a new syntax, heavy debate with people who have spent years writing code. I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.
shout out to one modern feature: sandbox
"Disable feature sets to prevent the interpreter from using certain system resources. Once a feature is disabled, there is no way to re-enable it."
I've been drawn into the Janet posts that surface every once in a while here on HN, but found the otherwise highly praised "Janet for Mortals", not being for mortals at all.
I'm surprised: the language is very straightfoward, simple, very few rules to remember. It's a Lisp but with a very small surface area.
I mean, compared to other languages, Janet really is easier to lean, so I'm surprised that the book for it is difficult (did not read the book, but familiar-ish with the language. I don't have anything but praise for it, TBH).
> But by allowing you to unquote literal functions, Janet makes it possible to write macros that are completely referentially transparent. These lisp guys really get excited over very abstract things. If you say this to an average person on the street they will probably try to run away.
Frankly, though, I think lispy community has benefited from being smaller. For example, even though the now ancient Design Patterns already warned programmers to prefer composition over inheritance, the OO programmers still created 15 levels deep hierarchies.
why is it called Janet? perhaps to prevent it to be identified with the acronym for Lots of Irritating Single Parenthesis?
But from the looks of it, Janet has some great ideas like the one that @ramblurr shared here about sandboxing ("Disable feature sets to prevent the interpreter from using certain system resources. Once a feature is disabled, there is no way to re-enable it.")
Lisp from my understanding is incredibly polarizing and many people love it and many people hate it and that's fine, but at a certain point wouldn't it feel repetitive for statement like this and I am unsure of how healthy discussion about programming concepts can be done this way.
There are so many interesting things from lisp-y languages like Janet and Julia is technically lisp-y too and Julia's compilation to GPU is awesome and Nim too which can compile to C/C++/JS!
It's just so many interesting concepts overall in programming that paranthesis don't seem a concern to me as the underlying concept can be translated to something else, like sandboxing feature, transpilation to GPU or multiple targets!
And there are many unique concepts in non-lispy languages like golang (cross-compat, portability with static binaries), elixir (concurrency!) too.
It's just good to see the amount of innovation within programming from all spheres of influence :-D
Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure! How fast is it? Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit. I wish this project had been a success (or something similar to it): https:…
> Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure! Just FYI, many of these are also done in Scheme and its derivative Racket. They kept lambda (but even Python did that), but progn -> begin, setq -> set!, car -> first, and so on. > Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible…
> Instead of regular expressions, Janet’s text wrangling is based around parsing expression grammars. Parsing expression grammars are simpler, more powerful, and more predictable than regular expressions. I would dispute that this is the case. In PEGs, alternatives are not commutative, unlike in regular expressions. This can lead to quite frustrating debugging. While a valid choice, the advantage over REs is overstat…