Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

janet-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 280 posts

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#111

Post by adamkl »

gfxgirl wrote: post #109
adamkl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

That assumes it is a tradeoff. Maybe you can have both. I see nothing obviously preventing having power, expressiveness, and reach, and ease of use

I agree that it doesn't have to be a trade-off, but that mindset might explain why there is less focus on creating one-click installers.

An example would be Clojure's newish approach to managing projects via the CLI and deps.edn. It's very powerful, and expressive, but definitely not a one-click approach.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#112

Post by cmiles74 »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #75
flaie wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No matter what some people say, getting started in Clojure is a nightmare. You just need Java installed on your system, then you install clojure (via brew, or sh install) and that's it, you're good to go. I've written a guide to starting with Clojure covering installation to REPL & IDE configuration: https://grison.me/2020/04/04/starting-with-clojure/

> you install clojure (via brew, or sh install) and that's it, you're good to go The vast majority of PCs are Windows, not Mac or Linux. Though WSL2 (available with Windows Insiders) makes working with Linux software a breeze, it's not the standard flow. Java isn't installed by default, either. Your guide suggests using WSL and IntelliJ. Does IntilliJ actually work with Closure running in WSL? For that matter, does t…

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 their "clj" tool which is, clearly, treating cross-platform concerns as an after thought. The Clojure organization conducts a survey every year and this is hurting their adoption with developers on Windows.

"One new question we asked this year was about the primary developer operating system to give us better guidance about tool-related work. As expected, MacOS was the leader (55%), followed by Linux (35%) and Windows (9%)"

Getting started with Leiningen, in my opinion, is much easier although, as has been pointed out, installing a JDK is an extra step that other languages don't have.

[0]: https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started

[1]: https://clojure.org/news/2020/02/20/state-of-clojure-2020

[2]: https://leiningen.org/

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#113

Post by qwerty456127 »

aasasd wrote: post #67
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.

You mean that the language should've been called ‘XÆA-12’ instead?

No, it should've been called X Æ A-12. At least one of the normal letters (X or A) should be Cyrillic and at least one of the spaces should be actually a tab.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#115

Post by mark_l_watson »

thanatropism wrote: post #107

Not mentioned here: Hy (hylang.org), a Lisp that manipulates/converts to the Python AST and therefore is fully interoperable with the whole vast Python ecosystem. Although the language is still somewhat short of 1.0, it has stopped changing (after a fairly dramatic turn circa 18) and I’ve been writing more Hy than straight Python for a while now. When I started using Streamlit (and then you can’t have a main.hy funct…

I certainly agree that if you need the Python ecosystem, then Hy makes development much more enjoyable, at least it does for me. I look at Hy in the same way as Armed Bear Common Lisp: as a great tool is I need the Java ecosystem.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#116

Post by yellowapple »

synthc wrote: post #78
anonymoushn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My position on the matter might be summarized as "No TCO, no copyable stackful coroutines, no buy." Separately from that a lot of my experience with the JVM involves things like trusting the JVM's claim that it spent 0 microseconds GCing a certain thread that was running code specifically designed to produce no garbage, then running the code in production for one day and losing tens of thousands of dollars, then lear…

Do you know of a production ready VM with these properties that has a nice ecosystem?

I reckon part of the point is that a VM (in the JVM or CLR sense) might be a poor fit for the given use case, as might an automatic garbage collector, and thus that might dictate the use of languages which rely on neither (like C/C++ or Rust).

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#117

Post by tmountain »

galfarragem wrote: post #35
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…

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 like lightweight and fresh too, but the JVM and Node both provide a tremendous amount of “batteries included” ecosystem value.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#118

Post by microcolonel »

galfarragem wrote: post #35
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…

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…

> Easy to get started: one click install, great website and concise docs.

Idunno, I read the whole homepage and I don't really know where to go to download it. Is "clone and run Meson" what you meant by "one click install"?

> No matter what some people say, getting started in Clojure is a nightmare.

On my distro I just do pacman -S clojure and I have a working clojure environment, on everything else it's usually available as one package. Not much of a "nightmare" to my eyes, at least when compared to Janet, which doesn't tell you how to install it anywhere on the website.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#119

Post by HelloNurse »

anonymoushn wrote: post #84
HelloNurse wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, on the first day day of testing under realistic load conditions you learned how to measure GC pauses; then, presumably, you were able to improve performance. It shouldn't have happened in a production environment, but setting up a way to lose tens of thousands of dollars if performance is bad, trusting unreasonable numbers, trying to produce no garbage, and requiring no GC pauses because margins are t…

Right, we improved the performance by moving the work out of the JVM. It's my fault that if you trade US equities based on old information you lose money? Edit: Actually, I'm still not sure how to correctly measure GC pauses, other than from inside the application.

It's your fault if you trade equities, or you do anything else in which milliseconds matter, with a software platform that is aggressively optimized for average performance and for server stability at the expense of hard real time guarantees and with a language that privileges enforcing constraints (both to ensure correctness and allow optimizations) over allowing the user explicit control. ("Your fault" at the organizational level, not personally, of course.)

Can you explain how Java was chosen for your trading application? Also, why were you unable to test it properly?

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#120

Post by cygx »

pjmlp wrote: post #71
xiaodai wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tried to install Clojure on Windows. Just flat out gave up.

1 - Download a JVM and make it available on the PATH 2 - Dowload clojure.jar 3 - Start command.com or PowerShell 4 - cd into clojure installation directory 5 - java -jar clojure.jar

Where can I get such a clojure.jar? What worked for me was

...

2 - Download clojure-1.10.1.jar, spec.alpha-0.2.176.jar, core.specs.alpha-0.2.44.jar from mvnrepository.com

...

5 - java -cp clojure-1.10.1.jar;spec.alpha-0.2.176.jar;core.specs.alpha-0.2.44.jar clojure.main

Post reply on HN