nimtraits VS hebigo

Thanks for your reply.

It's interesting to know what the perceived weaknesses are. Nim does have pattern matching but it's rarely used, whereas it seems to be used a lot in Rust (probably because of the prominence of enums). Nim has static lifetime management, but it's mainly used for eliding and thread safety (for now). Traits are an interesting feature, and make a good example of why I'm so bullish on Nim: someone has already replicated them with a macro: https://github.com/haxscramper/nimtraits

The popularity critical mass thing is mainly getting eyes on the language, but I think Nim has a slight advantage in that it's incredibly cooperative with its compile targets and FFI. Like Python, it's great for good glue code and 'scripting' without the performance penalty, and I hope that helps it meld into people's toolboxes over time.

The Lissp transpiler incrementally compiles and executes each top-level form to Python. It needs to do this in case there's a macro definition that might affect the compilation of a subsequent form. If it's only executing definitions, this is harmless, but if you want to precompile the main module, it needs the guard, or the side effects will happen too.

If you want Python to be as customizable as Lissp, check out Hissp (and Hebigo).

Python's lambdas can have as many lines as you want. Just wrap parens around it. Hissp uses this form as a compilation target. Its REPL shows the Python compilation. Play around with it til you get it: https://github.com/gilch/hissp

The original Lisp's S-expression syntax was just supposed to be an intermediate language used by the compiler when processing the real language based on M-expressions, which kind of never took off. Numerous alternatives to S-expressions have been proposed, and some retain homoiconicity, another feature diagnostic of a Lisp (and one that ECMAScript lacks). For example, see Hebigo's readme, which shows a direct correspondence between its Python-like syntax and that of Hissp's default reader (Lissp), which uses the S-expressions. Julia can also be written in S-expressions, but this usually only used in macro definitions.

I think LoL is too CL-specific. If you know both languages first, you can pretty much translate, but since they'd be trying to learn Lisp in the first place, this is a bad idea.

On the other hand, [Hissp][1] has a pretty good tutorial for anyone coming from a Python background.

[1]: https://github.com/gilch/hissp

Hebigo: a whitespaceLisp isomorphic to Hissp that looks like Python.