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Fennel brings Clojure style syntax to Lua
(fennel-lang.org)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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A community for the Lisp family of programming languages.
Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language. Only Fortran is older, by one year.
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- History of Lisp - John McCarthy's history of 12 February 1979.
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On first impression and never having worked with Lua, this sounds like Guile with extra steps.
It's mostly about having access to Lua ecosystem, also I'm personally a fan of Clojure style syntax. I find having literal syntax for maps, sets, and vectors in addition to lists, as well as stuff like destructuring, helps with readability.
Me too, at least in theory. I’ve followed Clojure pretty closely for someone who’s yet to actually use it except as a toy.
I've been lucky to work with it more or less exclusively for over a decade now. At this point I don't even want to touch anything else. :)
I’d like to work with Clojure, but I have a (perhaps irrational) dislike of the JVM, so I tend to keep an eye on Clojure dialects/descendants.
The JVM can be a bit of a resource hog, but it works well for stuff like web services which is what I mostly work on. That said, I highly recommend checking out babashka https://github.com/babashka/babashka
It's a graal compiled Clojure runtime that has a small memory footprint and instant startup. I've been using it a lot for scripting, and making small web apps like dashboards and it's been pretty nice, here's an example https://lemmy.ml/post/15390028
There’s also some kind of experiment going on where a JVM runtime is preloaded with Clojure, and that JVM & runtime is somehow frozen, packaged and deployed as an executable, thus eliminating the very high Clojure startup cost. I don’t remember where I saw this, unfortunately.
Yeah, there's been some work for speeding up clj running on the regular JVM, but I find it never really gets much interest. I think most people use clj for stuff like web services that are long running, and locally develop via the REPL so restarts aren't common.
One project worth watching is Jank, it aims to be mostly compatible but running on LLVM, still not quite production ready, but seems to have some community funding and being developed pretty actively https://jank-lang.org/