IronScheme VS ClojureCLR

Yep, they are a foreign idea in pretty much all languages, but they are super easy once you figure them out.

If anyone actually wants to get their hands dirty to learn about Lisp macros, I recommend picking a Lisp implementation like SBCL, GNU Guile, Emacs, Clojure, or Hylang depending on what kind of environment you're comfortable with. The key about each of the Lisp implementations I mentioned here is that they all support "Common Lisp style macros", which are the bare bones most obvious way to do macros in Lisp.

Then I recommend using your choice of Lisp to implement a language feature you use in another language. It doesn't matter if that language feature already exists in your choice of Lisp, you can still implement it yourself. For example, you can choose to implement C-style for loops or while loops, asynchronous coroutines like Go, pattern matching, lambdas, whatever. I actually implemented asnyc/await in IronScheme and pushed it upstream[0].

If you want to read more about Lisp macros, I have really enjoyed the book Let over Lambda. I have also heard a lot about On Lisp by pg, but I haven't read that myself yet. Also if you really want to dive off the deep end into the beauty of programming, I recommend SICP.

[0] https://github.com/IronScheme/IronScheme/pull/141

I recently pushed a library to IronScheme to implement anyc / await in a way that I felt was reasonable. Before that, IronScheme had pretty limited support for concurrency, so my goal was to create a library that provided concurrency facilities in a way that would interop nicely with .NET libraries.

Apparently this costs $99/yr for a company called Apex Data Solutions to wire the freely available IronScheme into Office 365 via its extension model. See their marketing and shop pages.

I love this example: https://github.com/IronScheme/IronScheme/commit/2f847793946935bd9143cdfb064f9006f763df68

you mean IronRust, to go with IronRuby and IronPython, IronScheme, and IronJS

Before Rich made Clojure for the JVM, he wrote dotLisp[1] for the CLR. Not long after Clojure was JVM hosted, it was also CLR hosted[2]. One of my first experiences with ML was F#[3], a ML variant that targets the CLR. These all predate the MIT licensed .net, but prior to that there was mono, which was also MIT licensed.

1: https://dotlisp.sourceforge.net/dotlisp.htm

2: https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr

3: https://fsharp.org/

Yea, that's true. I forgot about that. I did think of Clojure CLR, but I don't get the impression that this is an all that natural or used implementation. ClojureScript is obviously much more used, although it is still a "different" language.

https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr

ClojureCLR can already run on .NET 5.0 , so at least it made it through the .NET Core migration. I'm sure they'll get it to 6.0 at some point.

https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr/wiki/Getting-started

I recently found there was a clojure implementation for .NET and also one for the BEAM Virtual Machine. Has anyone used the latter? Regards

[1] https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr

Maybe it's not exactly a scheme, but there's Clojure CLR and it's actively maintained: https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr/wiki

https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr/commits/master