Live data from Hacker News

Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

janet-lang.org

71–80 of 280 posts

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#71
post #68
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/

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

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#72
post #41
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first point clearly didn't pan out. In reality, applications ended up bundling their own OSes along, so Clojure is stuck with antiquated VM on its ankle for no good reason.

> antiquated VM I'm always flabbergasted about the ignorance against the JVM on this site. There is nothing out there that has seen similiar research and optimisations and has so good monitoring/debugging tools.

HN has a very large bro/cowboy coder constituency. I suspect a large portion of the commenters here have not built anything non-trivial. You learn to filter it out but it's disappointing to learn that "engineers" are not much more rational and objective than the average Joe.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#73
post #68
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/

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

I still feel dreadful when doing all these integration with leninigen. Work for whole month then get it. But there is limit of my personal time budget.

And how to work with vscode as it all fails, at least windows.

But love clojure syntax. In particular I found it hard to see all () and the simple added some syntax sugars help the eye a lot.

Hence jump to janet. In fact the community is very helpful.

Not sure but the size is small enough to see whether one can do embedded as I try picolisp but it is bounded to a low end Env.

Very promising.

Btw the whole point I later schedule more time to try clojurescript to ... May be that can wait a bit.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#74
post #41
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first point clearly didn't pan out. In reality, applications ended up bundling their own OSes along, so Clojure is stuck with antiquated VM on its ankle for no good reason.

> antiquated VM I'm always flabbergasted about the ignorance against the JVM on this site. There is nothing out there that has seen similiar research and optimisations and has so good monitoring/debugging tools.

Add the various JVM implementations, ART and the .NET variants into it as well.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#75
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 the VS Code plugin?

These are all headaches a new programmer won't have when getting setup with PHP, Python, JavaScript or most popular languages.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#76
post #69
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/

This process might seem easy for you, but maybe not for people installing Clojure for the first time. In an extreme case, someone who doesn't know Java ecosystem might want to stop to research: what is JVM, why is it necessary, which version would be the best, what's the difference between Oracle's Java and OpenJDK, etc...

One could say the same for a plethora of programming languages some research is needed and we don't have to resort to extreme cases.

Out of the top of my head:

- There is the Python 2.7/3.X situation still going on, then there are the several distributions of python.

- GNU's R has a similar problem

- Installing gcc on windows was (perhaps still is) a confusing mess for a newcomer.

IMO I did not find installing clojure any harder than installing Scala for instance, and yet I have never heard (anecdotal, I know) complaining about Scala.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#77
post #60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is state of the art in the same sense that America is the uncontested leader in WWE.

Is it? I've looked hard and couldn't find any runtime that isn't more than five years behind OpenJDK(+Graal) in those areas, but maybe I missed something. I'm not saying it's perfect, but there's nothing out there that's better in those areas.

Just to add to your point the only alternative that I would consider is .NET, and even then I do acknowledge that it is behind some JIT stuff, given that they have been favoring AOT / and single JIT scenarios.

Without Valhahla we will never get a Java variant of Unity, jMonkey Engine is a good as it gets and it has plenty of native code to overcome the areas where the JVM is found lacking.

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#78
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> antiquated VM I'm always flabbergasted about the ignorance against the JVM on this site. There is nothing out there that has seen similiar research and optimisations and has so good monitoring/debugging tools.

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?

Re: Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

#80
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…

I have both a MacBook Pro and a standard PC running Windows, and yes on Windows I run Clojure both on Windows and inside WSL, both IntelliJ and VSCode works pretty well with WSL there's really no problem running it.

I'm doing a lot of Clojure since years both on my MBP and on Windows and there's no problem at all doing that way. Besides VSCode even has a plugin for WSL which will let you directly hook into it.

So yeah there are some questions like which Java to install, which IDE, .. but these questions are the same for other programming languages.

If you have any hint regarding how to improve my guide don't hesitate to tell me if something is not clear in it :)

Post reply on HN