Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM

Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by osense on Friday June 05, 2015 @03:59PM (#9667746)

Interesting - can anyone provide an in-depth comparison to LFE [1]? From a quick look, it looks like Joxa is more similar to Clojure than it is to Common Lisp, whereas LFE takes the opposite appoach.

[1] https://github.com/rvirding/lfe

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Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by cyberlync on Friday June 05, 2015 @06:19PM (#9668560)

Its mostly about approach. LFE (literally Lisp Flavored Erlang) is Erlang with an S-expression based syntax. Joxa is a self contained Lisp that happens to run on the Erlang VM.

Those are the core differences. Joxa also has some very clear and distinct goals of its own. Those goals are not really relevant to this discussion though.

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Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by rvirding on Friday June 05, 2015 @11:44PM (#9669543)

Not quite, LFE is a self-contained Lisp system with all the things you would expect a lisp system to have. It has been designed to run on the Erlang/OTP system and to efficiently use all the features of that system and its VM. This means that LFE has a clean interface to Erlang/OTP so it can easily be used together with applications written in Erlang. Mixing components written in Erlang and in LFE to write a larger application is straight-forward and painless.

If I could rename it then a better name would be EFL (Erlang Flavoured Lisp), which is what it is. The "Flavoured" in the name comes from that I had earlier implemented a Lisp machines flavors system on another lisp, with an english spelling thrown in as a joke.

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Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by oubiwann on Saturday June 06, 2015 @05:40PM (#9672374)

Oh, wow -- that's a great tidbit! I hadn't heard that before, Robert (one for the LFE Lore files ...)

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Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by rdtsc on Friday June 05, 2015 @05:22PM (#9668265)

If I recall correctly Joxa is Lisp-1 and LFE is a Lisp-2.

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Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by cyberlync on Friday June 05, 2015 @06:19PM (#9668565)

This is true as well.

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Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by yellowapple on Friday June 05, 2015 @04:44PM (#9668024)

The obvious difference is that LFE is maintained by Robert Virding (one of the original creators of Erlang itself). I'd imagine this would translate to LFE being more "Erlangy", but this assumption comes from a lack of experience with either.

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Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by oubiwann on Friday June 05, 2015 @08:53PM (#9669120)

So a couple of comments here :-) Robert is actually an old-school Lisper (and a hard-core one, too). LFE has been inspired not only by CL but also Maclisp. The point being that, yeah, he's an Erlang guy, but he was first a Lisp guy (and has always remained so).

Second comment: LFE is a Lisp, but it's a Lisp whose first and foremost goal was to allow one to build fully Erlang (and OTP)-compatible systems in Lisp. Clojure's Lisp has a Java flavour; LFE's Lisp has an Erlang flavour. They are both very real and compelling Lisps :-)

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Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by yellowapple on Monday June 08, 2015 @12:08PM (#9679970)

Thanks for the clarifications.

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Re:Joxa – A Modern Lisp for the Erlang VM by diginux on Friday June 05, 2015 @05:54PM (#9668428)

I will see if I can get Eric (the creator) to reply.

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