chibi-scheme VS mal

Your core point is absolutely true about how Lisp is special in that it usually provides a read procedure to turn a textual type into a native object that can be evaluated (this is a side effect of homoiconicity, so any homoiconic language will have this property too), but I have one additional nitpick to make ontop of yours:

> [...] eval can take any lisp object and evaluate it.

eval cannot be generalized to accepting any Lisp object, only specifically symbolic expressions (symbols, or lists (potentially nested) of symbols). I discovered this because I thought Chibi Scheme was throwing a warning for valid code[0] to inject a value into an expression for eval, but Marc helped me understand that the warning was correct, because Scheme only specifies what eval does for symbolic values.

[0] https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme/issues/902

I think a VM for a small, but highly abstract, language like Scheme might address the objections of the author(s) of this article. You might like Chibi-Scheme: https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme

Having said that, IMO, if you're having fun with uxn and its retro 8-bit aesthetic, by all means keep going with that.

I would also add [chibi scheme](https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme) to the C-embedded alternatives.

This one? https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme I notice it's intended to be embedded in C, so it's not a perfect match.

Chibi-Scheme's definition is interesting:

>Would be interesting to see how the interpreter works actually...

It's quite easy to see, there are interpeters for Lisp in like 20 lines or so.

Here's a good one:

https://norvig.com/lispy.html

(It has the full code in a link towards the bottom)

There's also this:

https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Here is one implementation of a lisp (mal specifically) in matlab: https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/dcf8f4d7b9cf7b858850a04a0...

Only 260 lines of code, pretty concise :)

have a look at the crafting interpreters book, plus make a lisp (lisp is a great first language to make a compiler/interpreter for, just google "lisp compiler/interpreter" and you'll find lots of resources)

If you're really okay with the limitations of a tree-walk interpreter, you might want to check out MAL, which will teach you how to write a tree-walk interpreter for a LISP. The code for MAL has been translated to most popular languages, so you can work through the creation of an interpreter in the language of your choice. JLox would give you a bit more detail and a more complex language, but I'm not convinced that it's all that important.

Write a small programming language (lisp (https://github.com/kanaka/mal) or brainfuck) in C++ to learn the syntax more. This will teach you a lot about programming languages in general.

So I started some hobbyist game dev using Unity and realised that the full process of making a game has dependencies on a mass of lower-level skills including lighting virtual environments. As a hobbyist photographer I could see some useful analogies from lighting studios and other scenes

So I pivoted, and eventually made money, not from selling a game, but from developing tutorials about digital lighting. I was also able to contribute to a project at work that was making a product based on commercial games engine, not by actually coding it, but by helping to better estimate the costs of the asset generation required.

Coding Unity object scripts in C# also got me back into programming, and I went on to successfully build a self-hosting lisp interpreter following the Make a Lisp guidelines [0].

[0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md

Hijacking the top comment to add https://buildyourownlisp.com and https://github.com/kanaka/mal