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Why Janet? (2023)

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Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#161

Post by drob518 »

chamomeal wrote: post #159
maleldil wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don’t program in Lisp, do you? Not anymore. I started with Racket and went through the Little Schemer. I did Clojure for a while. I even used Babashka to write all my scripts, then later rewrote them in other languages. I gave it a good try. Maybe it wasn't enough to properly "get it"?

Aw man I love babashka. I will say the lack of static types in clojure is pretty brutal for me. Especially when combined with the obtuse error messages. But I still love babashka and the whole REPL driven world. What did you end up rewriting your bb scripts in?

If there's one thing that I sometimes wish Lisp had, it's types. Most of the time, I don't need or even want them. But when you're doing a big refactor or changing the shape of your primary data structure, it would be nice to have the compiler be able to assist you in detecting locations where you've cross-wired something. But other than that, I don't care. And yes, Clojure's error messages could be better, but they have been getting better over time.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#162

Post by drob518 »

cdelsolar wrote: post #110
drob518 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t program in Lisp, do you? I used to be confused by the smug Lisp weenies. Now I am one. And the difficult thing I’ve found over the years is that Lisp is sort of unexplainable. You either “get it” or you don’t. Yes, it has macros, but macros are a bit overrated. I’ve been programming in Lisp for decades and I rarely write macros. I think the thing that is difficult to convey is how powerful Lisp’s core execu…

this is incredibly smug, but fun to read :) I briefly "got" Clojure but forgot again. Maybe I'll give this Janet thing a try.

LOL, indeed. Clojure is fun. I haven't used Janet, but I appreciate seeing some of the good ideas that it stole from Clojure (stealing being the sincerest form of flattery, and all that). IMO, one of Clojure's greatest gifts, above and beyond other traditional Lisps like CL and Scheme, is its focus on immutable data structures. When I started playing with Clojure, I was skeptical. I figured performance was going to be horrible. Now, I can't live without them. It's one of those subtle features that just changes how you program. It's one reason I choose Clojure over CL and Scheme today. Janet seems to have both mutable and immutable data structures, which is nice. Clojure has transients, but that's sort of partially mutable. That said, with Clojure, one of the nice things is that you can always drop back to Java's full mutability if you want, but that's obviously relying on the platform and not Clojure the language.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#163

Post by layer8 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #152
layer8 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are reasons why not that many programmers “get it”, and it’s not because the others are uninformed. It’s a matter of valuing different things.

Hmm, that'd be weird, how do you know you "value something different" if you haven't "got it"? You'd need to "get it" first, then you can understand if you value something different or not, otherwise how would you know?

The usual insinuation is that if you don’t like it, you “just don’t get it”. I meant not “getting it” in that sense.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#164

Post by Caracas288 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #18
krinne wrote: post #3

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.

> I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed. In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]. Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person. [1] Second-to-last, actually, seeing as there seems to be a new homepage right now. [2] https://www.t…

Altman’s orb is as terrifying as it is because businesses might see it as a solution to a real problem—a problem he helped to create.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#165

Post by veqq »

a-french-anon wrote: post #80

> SETQ is def At first I said "what" out loud, since SETQ doesn't create bindings, it only updates them then I read the doc ( https://janet-lang.org/docs/bindings.html ) and the author is indeed wrong ("bindings created with def are immutable"). He probably meant "SETQ is set". I really want to like Janet, as it seems to be the sweet spot between Guile, Tcl and CL (minus the speed/maturity of SBCL) but I have a visce…

You can... just not use square (and curly) brackets. Instead of `[1 2 3]` just write `(array 1 2 3)`. Instead of `(fn [x] (+ 1 x))` just write `(f (x) (+ 1 x))`. They are never necessary.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#166

Post by [deleted] »

drob518 wrote: post #143
layer8 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are reasons why not that many programmers “get it”, and it’s not because the others are uninformed. It’s a matter of valuing different things.

Absolutely! But it’s also because they don’t really understand one of the things. It’s the Blub Paradox.

[deleted]

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#168

Post by veqq »

soomtong wrote: post #70

This document was really helpful when I first met Janet: https://janetdocs.org/tutorials https://janet.guide/ (the author's one)

I'm really happy you liked it! It's still a work in progress.
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