Why Fennel?

> I find most niche / less popular languages lack the developer tools ecosystem in ways that simply hinders adoption by more devs.

Niche languages often serve specific purposes that don't require broad tooling. They also sometimes can leverage tooling from more popular languages. Less popular doesn't necessarily mean less capable - some niche languages have excellent tooling in their domain. Not to mention that not all developers need the same type of tooling or prioritize certain set of tools equally, like for example, for me personally - homoiconicity and REPL-connectivity in a language are far more important than LSP or some other things.

> I specifically DON'T want to have a window that shows all my other open files.

There are multiple different ways of separating project/workspace/etc. contexts in Emacs - tab-bar mode, persp.el, etc.

I haven't really touched my emacs config in years. I just set it up how I wanted and now I use it to pay my bills. It sounds like the flexibility was just too tempting for you to not hack on it when you should be doing other things.

I stand corrected:

    % git remote -v
    origin https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/fennel (fetch)
    origin https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/fennel (push)

    % git log --reverse
    commit 9afe4338ed1816a759cb4b120f89e8f67159ce16
    Author: Calvin Rose <calsrose@gmail.com>
    Date:   Sun Aug 7 18:50:34 2016

        First commit.

    commit b62a24853e24662f76932a2a81bb77cc25704491
    Author: Calvin Rose <calsrose@gmail.com>
    Date:   Sun Aug 7 19:05:40 2016

        Add some examples.

    commit 5e3e0fe11e4f56007b3523e54d81d55280ef2204
    Author: Calvin Rose <calsrose@gmail.com>
    Date:   Tue Aug 9 08:27:43 2016

        Update README.md

Interesting. I saw another link here of someone who insists on making C# run everywhere, now someone who insists on LISPs.

I really want to try making a language that is imperative, like really imperative, where every line must start with a verb, just to see what it would look like.

Great book—as an entry point for designing languages.

If you learn better by video than by reading, the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs lectures by Abelson and Sussman are spectacular. I have watched the entire course multiple times. The SICP book also receives a lot of praise, but I have yet to read it myself. They specifically use Scheme, but most of the knowledge can be translated to other Lisp dialects as well. The biggest difference between the different Lisp dialects are the macro systems and the standard libraries, so getting started and learning it doesn't really matter which one you choose. GNU Guile or Racket would be easy to use to follow along with SICP though.

A good text to make you aware of the power of Lisp is "The Anatomy of Lisp" by John Allen (MIT). It's an old text but they don't write books like that anymore.

> what's the best way to learn it?

What's the best way to learn programming in general? For me, is to try to build something. Find a problem, pick a Lisp, start building.

Just make sure to have two things: structural editing and the REPL. Without these two, Lisp may feel awkward. But when you have the ability to quickly move any expression around, transpose them, etc., - writing programs becomes like composing haikus or something. You basically will be moving some "lego-pieces" around. With the connected REPL, you will be able to eval any expression in-place, from where you're writing your code.

I started without these and indeed, that was challenging. Having to balance the parentheses by hand, counting them, omg, I was so obtuse, but I'm glad I didn't give up. You don't have to go too crazy - in the beginning, something that automatically balances out the parens, or highlights them when they are not, and lets you grab an expression and paste it somewhere else would be good enough.

And the REPL. Shit, I didn't know any better, I thought I was suppose to be copypasting or typing things into it. That is not the way! Find a way to eval expressions in-place. Some editors even show you the result of the computations right where the cursor is.

I have done years of programming prior to discovering Lisp, and I don't really understand how I was okay without it. I wish someone has insisted to try it out. Today I don't even understand how can anyone identify as a programmer and "hate" Lisp, just because they have stared at some obscure Lisp code for like two minutes at some point.

Yeah was going to change that part too for something like "Writing code like this is verbose and spans too many lines", but then I just thought it'd be better if it sounded more like the parent comment.

And I understand it doesn't resonate with most, I just wanted to highlight how the initial parent comment was very subjective and not very substantive, some people didn't take the joke so well, I guess it could've sounded a bit passive aggressive. I personally enjoy both C-like and Lisp-like syntaxes and languages, I do have a sweet spot for Forth tho.

But back on topic, Fennel is a great language, working with Love and Fennel is really nice. And if the parentheses can seem off-putting for some, I'd highly encourage to give it a shot as you can quickly get past it and see how comfy it feels to have your statements properly demarkated.

S-expr shine the most when working with XML-like structure. Spinneret[1] was the most fun I ever had working with HTML, every other templating engine feels subpar now that I have tasted that sweet nectar..

[1] https://github.com/ruricolist/spinneret

>> as it mainly applies to Lisp-like languages that uses parentheses heavily.

This is so wrong. Lisp does not use parentheses heavily. It doesent even use more parens than any C like language. I just dont understand the fixation with parentheses. The power of lisps comes from the fact that everything is an expression. Someone can correct me if I am wrong, since I only have experience with functional lisp Clojure, but I believe other lisps are more or less similar.

So if everything can be evaluated, then you can have a really great REPL experience. You can be inside your favorite editor and have the tightest feedback loop possible. So the absence of statements is actually a great feature of the language which improves ergonomics.

>Does not make sense in this context, as it mainly applies to Lisp-like languages that uses parentheses heavily.

I had read, some years back, that someone did an actual calculation / demonstration that showed that the number of symbol / punctuation characters in Lisp is actually less than in C-based languages, for a block of code with equal functionality in both languages.

I don't have the reference handy. Someone here may know of it, and post it.

[dead]

> One "statement" per line is bog standard

This isn't really true. Most non-Lisp languages I work in, like JS or Ruby or Python, have things like long_expression =\n long_other_expression, or long_expression\n.another_long_expression\n.another_long_expression.

When writing code you are transforming it all the time. Having only expressions (mostly) comes in very handily. It is called structured editing of code.

It's not an exact repeat.

Sure. Here's a comment with more of an explanation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36158974

If you parse things with structure, and the structure is unknown in advance. In C(++) you have to generate all dynamically, and is very complex.

In other systems, you can just read the object, and the structure comes with it.

Sandboxed lua can't assume it has access things like debug libraries or any of the file IO, among other things. Many setups pretty aggressively remove and/or patch libraries and even large parts of the default global table. Assuming a vanilla lua library environment can make a project like this unusable in many places.

I might be remembering wrong on where the problem was exactly, but it was either the generated code, or the code for the Fennel transpiler itself.

I just know that I tried to use it without loading Lua's libraries (i.e. without calling the `luaL_openlibs` function or equivalent) and was unable to.

> I just copy the compiled lua into the place the program expects to find lua scripts.

Yeah most existing programs just load all Lua libraries by default, so that's generally not an issue.

My post is more from the point of view of embedding a restricted Lua interpreter into a program (i.e. only Lua-the-language, not Lua-the-language-plus-its-libraries) while still supporting Fennel.

---

EDIT: Just checked, the Fennel code `(lambda [foo bar] bar)` compiles to Lua code that calls `_G.assert`.

That would be a question of definitions :)

It's mostly addition by now, rare that something disappears or changes significantly.

No prod use by anyone afaik.