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Why Janet? (2023)

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Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#61

Post by zelphirkalt »

IshKebab wrote: post #2

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:…

Out of those renames, I agree with car->first and progn->do. setq is ugly, but I think using def is maybe questionable. lambda I would have just kept the same.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#63

Post by ponkpanda »

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…

Perhaps requiring webauthn credential for any post/comment with a whitelist of permitted webauthn hardware devices which must have touch/interaction enabled.

I'd have to read the FIDO specs, however the only place I've seen webauthn hardware pinning in the wild is with Azure AD/Entra which is ostensibly based on token GUID. If this is the only enforcement mechanism available, it's spoofable.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#64

Post by ramon156 »

dust-jacket wrote: post #60
geokon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lobste.rs uses a web-of-trust referral system. I guess it still involves a moderator killing off bad nodes, but it seems to scale well

yeah but I can't post there because I don't know anyone with an account and frankly CBA traipsing around looking for someone who has an account. does seem like more things will have to go this way though

+1, if anyone wants to help me I'd be honored. mail me at ramon(@)odeva(.)nl

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#65

Post by 9dev »

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.

> a community online where AI isnt allowed.

This is something I think about a lot, especially how one could pull it off without tearing down anonymity online. Having some sort of "proof of humanity" is a hard problem to solve.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#67

Post by fredrikholm »

uka wrote: post #4

> 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.

> very abstract things

A C macro with literals that lacks referential transparency:

  #define MULTIPLY(x, y) x * y
  int result = MULTIPLY(2 + 3, 4); // 14
Not knowing what something means does not make it bad, which is what I'm assuming you meant given how you phrased your sentence.

Having a shared language of patterns and problems that occur in programming is a good thing. Ridiculing such terminology on the basis of "that group of programmers sure are weird" is pointless and counter productive.

Re: Why Janet? (2023)

#68

Post by jurip »

embedding-shape wrote: post #49
xigoi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that instead of having to learn tens of different syntactic constructs with subtle and often arbitrary differences, you just have parentheses and use them to build everything.

This is such a undervalued benefit, once you've learned s-expressions, you can basically learn a bunch of languages without having to learn completely new syntax. It'll be slightly different, with different idioms and names, but a hell of a lot easier than doing the same across every "It's like C but 50% of the syntax is different actually" language out there, which is most of them.

Is the syntax really the stumbling block for most languages? Would Rust's lifetimes or Swift's isolation rules be easier if they used more parens? Are the scoping rule differences between Emacs Lisp and Scheme easier to comprehend because the syntax is similar?
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