Fennel VS awesome-clojure-likes

It's interesting: minimal software is out there, but folks don't tend to choose it. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to be conservative in my dependencies, and this encourages a lightweight stack that tends to perform pretty well. These days, I'm favoring tools like Lua, SQLite, Fennel[0], Althttpd[1], Fossil[2], and the Mako Server[3] and find that great, lightweight, stable, efficient software is to be had, for free, but you have to go a bit off the beaten path. This isn't stuff you hear about on Stack Overflow.

In terms of frontend, which the post focuses on (Google Docs and a 30MB doc), I guess I'm conflicted. While I tend to favor native apps + web pages, I'm also a daily Tiddlywiki user, and I really think web apps have their place (heck, one idea I'm working on is a lightweight local server that lets you run web apps like Tiddlywiki). But without a doubt, Tiddlywiki is more resource intensive than Emacs (my go-to for notetaking when I'm not on TW). My tab for a 6MB Tiddlywiki file uses 155MB of RAM, and my (heavily customized, dozens of open buffers) Emacs session uses 88MB. So I do think the author has a good point.

[0]: https://fennel-lang.org/

Eh it's not just luajit and luajit didn't create that problem either. It's a symptom of lua actually succeeding at its design goal of being easily embedded as an extension language. A significant number of incompatible runtimes are more popular than the most recent puc lua, including I believe the older official lua 5.2 released in 2011.

I've done a fair bit of professional lua development and I don't think I've ever written standalone up-to-date puc lua except maybe for some tooling & scripts. It's such a small language and used in such a way that the runtime, distribution method, and available APIs have much more impact on your use (and compatibility) than the version.

Virtually everyone shipping a lua environment is also shipping changes to it that make it a unique target, if only extensions to the standard library. This is why I think syntax layer-only approach like fennel's is the correct choice for improving on lua. It mirrors lua's runtime semantics exactly, and allows you to access the implementation peculiars on their own terms and so can just be run on time of any lua system.

https://fennel-lang.org

Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.

> I’m positive that there is a Lispy language out there (actually in existence, or the aether) that is appropriate for embedded work, but the constraints of the target make it difficult to envision.

Perhaps Fennel* fits the bill?

* https://fennel-lang.org/

I've also seen neovim plugins written in fennel [0], so if you want something lispy, that's possible now.

[0]: a Lisp that compiles to Lua, https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel

Something similar: Fennel (https://fennel-lang.org/) is a lisp that compiles into Lua, which nvim can use as plugins, so you can write nvim plugins in a lisp. Aniseed (https://github.com/Olical/aniseed) makes this really easy.

If you want a more FP language on the Lua runtime, you might be interested in Fennel. I wrote a post about adding Fennel compiler to a hslua interpreter a while back, which might be useful for you.

I really sympathize here, Clojure is such a cool kid. Unfortunately, I did not find a satisfying clojure-like langage, here is a good list of similar or inspired langages : https://github.com/chr15m/awesome-clojure-likes

I think Clojure will be a very hard language to supersede. Lisp syntax in general is not very common, so lots of people dismiss it just because of that. The ones that don't, usually look on programming languages differently, and won't leave Clojure unless a serious contender with a seriously awesome team behind it pops up, which since I started doing Clojure (~2010) hasn't happened yet and seems unlikely to happen.

Although there are some nice efforts on getting wider support for Clojure. Babashka is one of my favorite projects, that leverages SCI (Small Clojure Intreper) and GraalVM to build a subset of Clojure that can startup much faster, making Clojure suitable for CLIs and desktop apps.

Then we have the Clojure-like languages that takes the best ideas of Clojure with some differences and different runtimes. Joker comes to mind as one of those. Here are some others: https://github.com/chr15m/awesome-clojure-likes

I also think ClojureScript is still a hidden gem in the frontend world. Now with the rise of shadowcljs, it becomes easier to get started, which is seemingly super important for the JS world (rather than focus on longterm experience, first timer experience is the focus), so more people will see the strength in Clojure for client-side clients, especially if the data structures you're dealing with is coming from 3rd party clients instead of you making them up on the backend.

All in all, Clojure will be hard to replace, but definitely not impossible, it'll just take a lot. For now, Clojure is the king on the hill, with it's small versions eating up some smaller hills. In my view, it's time has yet to come.