Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp

Re:Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp by kerkeslager on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @10:19AM (#23167119)

I'm in no way associated with Janet, so I can't answer for them. But as someone who is implementing their own language which shares a lot of goals with Guile, the reason I didn't contribute to Guile is that Guile is an implementation of the Scheme Standard, and it bound at least loosely to that. Certain modern features just aren't compatible and might not be accepted if you go through the effort of implementing them. There are real benefits to implementing a standard, and I'm not criticizing Guile for doing that--I use Guile. But if your goals aren't compatible with the standard you have no choice but to go a different way.

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Re:Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp by desiderantes on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @10:43AM (#23167332)

Guile is more than a Scheme implementation. You can implement a completely new language for it (somebody recently did Python) and reuse their embedding capabilities. Guile comes with an Ecmascript implementation, just to show that it can be done.

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Re:Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp by kerkeslager on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @11:27AM (#23167801)

You can do that in most (all?) Scheme implementations. Macros are powerful, yo.

This goes back to another discussion here: just because you've implemented a language doesn't mean you've implemented it well. Sure, I can implement all the syntax of what I want. But is it fast? Does it report errors well? Am I enforcing my type system, or can I accidentally drop back into normal Scheme?

I think a lot of times new Lispers learn macros and, drunk with their newfound power, start writing 20% implementations that get them 80% to mature languages. And if you don't need or want the other 20% of a mature language, then that's fine. But if you do need or want the other 20% of a mature language, then you'll quickly discover that the Pareto Principle[1] applies. Lisp metaprogramming can be super powerful, but it's not a magic bullet: not only does it not kill werewolves but you can shoot yourself in the foot with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle#In_computing

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