Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

Robert Virding has just announced the release on twitter https://twitter.com/rvirding/status/710259707819249664

I feel that this LFE release further validates BEAM as a promising platform for future development of new programming languages. Also I look forward to reading SICP converted to LFE. Available chapters can be found here https://www.gitbook.com/book/lfe/sicp

Great news! I wanted to learn BEAM/OTP, but had tried Erlang briefly years ago, and then went back to Common Lisp. Now I can try to learn BEAM/OTP in a syntax that is more appealing to me than Elixir's Ruby-like syntax. I like Elixir, and it is very popular, but true runtime macros are available in LFE 1.0. In addition, Robert Virding was one of the co-creators of Erlang, so his devotion to bringing the best Lisp he could to the BEAM platform within its confines, comes with some authority. The Google Group Lisp Flavoured Erlang is a very responsive community and resource for getting started. Congratulations LFE on your v1.0! OT, but I also use Extempore - the music, graphics livecoding environment with a great language, xtlang that I believe was based upon S7 scheme and has an LLVM backend [1]. There are some s-expression to WebAssembly projects floating around too. All around good news for all the choices to work with up front no matter your preferences.

   [1]  http://extempore.moso.com.au/

One obvious example is that AFAIK the VM doesn't support functions with a variable number of arguments (foo/1 and foo/2 are two separate functions). This means that you can't have CL-style &rest or &key arguments.

While &key is CL-specific (and if you don't have it, you can ad-hoc it if you have variable arguments) variadic functions are pretty important, and found broadly in Lisp dialects.

If you're on a VM or other target that doesn't do them natively, it's worth fighting tooth and nail to somehow get the functionality.

E.g. make an inefficient variadic type that at the VM level takes a single argument---a list or vector of the arguments. Or multiple types for different combinations of fixed arg arity plus variable list.

It started in 2007 with the release of Clojure and there are still plenty of paren keys around.