One of the particularly nice things about LFE is the team's commitment to documentation. Duncan McGreggor has done a great job.
Lisp Flavoured Erlang
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it is built right on top of Erlang for seamless integration, and of note is that it was created by Robert Virding, one of the original creators of Erlang along with Joe Armstrong. LFE macros deliver true homoiconicity to Erlang. It is a Lisp 2, and supports function and macro definitions at the REPL. I prefer it to Elixir, because I prefer Lisp. Robert has also created a Lua 5.2 written in pure Erlang. Evidently,…
Erlang Copied Scala's Actors & Erlang's VM is almost a Clone of the JVM - Apr 01, 2011 Erlang was released in 1986, Java in 1995, and Scala in 2004. I wouldn't be surprised if LFE were older than Scala.
According to Wikipedia, work on BEAM started in 1992. Still earlier than Java.
LFE appeared in 2008, so it's newer than Scala.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#13I think it would be nice to see some comparison to Clojure for example which is a JVM-integrated lisp-1. I have for example Elixir on my radar for a while but I'm very interested in seeing more lisp dialects running on popular VM implementations. My point is that I don't know how to compare this to Clojure (in my case). What advantages does it have and why should I use it?
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#14The right aligned text bugs me very much whenever I see this website. It's unnatural.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#15I think it would be nice to see some comparison to Clojure for example which is a JVM-integrated lisp-1. I have for example Elixir on my radar for a while but I'm very interested in seeing more lisp dialects running on popular VM implementations. My point is that I don't know how to compare this to Clojure (in my case). What advantages does it have and why should I use it?
I am a fan of clojure. I'm interested in LFE, but I've been focussing on learning Haskell lately, and don't want to switch gears yet.
The big thing that I miss in clojure are the data structures, and the ease of use of those data structures. Specifically vectors and maps. These exist all over the place, but no where (in my experience) are they as pain-free as clojure.
That combined with their immutability (yet easy to transform) is a really significant win for productivity.
As I've looked for other languages to learn, those sorts of easy to use and highly productive datastructures has been a top criteria.
Haskell has them, but I wouldn't put them on the easy to use list yet. However I'm still learning, and it might just come down to familiarity.
Chicken Scheme has them as an egg, but the syntax makes them far more encumbering than clojure.
If LFE has the same unencumbered immutable datastructures for maps and vectors, well, that would be exciting to me.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#16I think it would be nice to see some comparison to Clojure for example which is a JVM-integrated lisp-1. I have for example Elixir on my radar for a while but I'm very interested in seeing more lisp dialects running on popular VM implementations. My point is that I don't know how to compare this to Clojure (in my case). What advantages does it have and why should I use it?
I am a fan of clojure. I'm interested in LFE, but I've been focussing on learning Haskell lately, and don't want to switch gears yet. The big thing that I miss in clojure are the data structures, and the ease of use of those data structures. Specifically vectors and maps. These exist all over the place, but no where (in my experience) are they as pain-free as clojure. That combined with their immutability (yet easy t…
Elixir certainly does. Check out the docs for the Enum package.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#17I love the website!!!
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#18I think it would be nice to see some comparison to Clojure for example which is a JVM-integrated lisp-1. I have for example Elixir on my radar for a while but I'm very interested in seeing more lisp dialects running on popular VM implementations. My point is that I don't know how to compare this to Clojure (in my case). What advantages does it have and why should I use it?
I am a fan of clojure. I'm interested in LFE, but I've been focussing on learning Haskell lately, and don't want to switch gears yet. The big thing that I miss in clojure are the data structures, and the ease of use of those data structures. Specifically vectors and maps. These exist all over the place, but no where (in my experience) are they as pain-free as clojure. That combined with their immutability (yet easy t…
> The big thing that I miss in clojure are the data structures, and the ease of use of those data structures. Specifically vectors and maps. These exist all over the place, but no where (in my experience) are they as pain-free as clojure.
I'm not sure I understand. Why do you miss them when you have them in Clojure? Is it a typo and you meant to say LFE?
By the way one of my biggest productivity boost for me is the hot code swap which works in Clojure seamlessly. In java you can't do this wihtout JRebel for example. What is the case with LFE?
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#19That cup of coffee in the logo suggests they are compiling to the Java JVM. If true, this makes me wonder why aren't they using Erlang itself as a target?
They are not compiling to JVM. LFE compiles to BEAM.
From the docs I understand that it is interpreted and runs on erlang vm. I did not find anywhere that lfe code is compiled.
Re: Lisp Flavoured Erlang
#20As a Clojure fan, I tried using this, but I got the impression it has learned next to nothing from Clojure, so I ended up going with Elixir instead.
Particularly:
- No data structure literals (?) - (except e.g., '(1 2 3) for lists)
- Manual module exports, instead of just having 2 versions of def
- Other small syntactic annoyances, like plain parens everywhere, instead of brackets in some cases like Clojure, and atoms (like keywords in clojure) started with "'" rather than ":"