oh VS cafe-latte

I think an extensible shell like oh shell would be something I would prefer. Though it should not need closures on heap to extend (which is ridolous slow on arithmetic) and generate the data types at compilation time.

> Is there a reason we aren’t using a shell with a proper programming language for scripting?

Mostly because the people who want to introduce a "programming language" into the shell don't prioritize being a shell.

Check out the "Oh" shell for contrast. This is what a programming language looks like when you force it to conform to being a shell first priority.

https://github.com/michaelmacinnis/oh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1m-WEZz46U

This is "Scheme-like" but has FEXPRs so things can be redefined and evaluation can be controlled.

I love chatting about Kernel :D Here's my most recent post: https://lobste.rs/s/d0hogq/problem_with_macros#c_nozcrm

Thanks for showing me Oh! It really has f-exprs?! I didn't immediately see it in https://github.com/michaelmacinnis/oh/blob/main/doc/manual.m...

Have you already evaluated cafe-latte?

This may interest you: cafe-latte. It's an implementation of CL's condition system (which has restarts) in Java.

Lack of macros makes nothing impossible, but also makes many things harder. I think of them as code generators, tiny compilers on a micro scale; they are invoked by the proper compiler during compilation phase, as opposed to runtime, allowing you to inject code that you'd otherwise need to inline by hand.

It's possible to write pretty complex things like control flow abstractions using just structures and functions/methods, e.g. a CL-esque condition system in Java which only uses classes, static methods, and Java lambdas[0] for its syntax. Possible, but also IMO ugly when compared to the CL counterpart, because the low-level but irrelevant details (such as instantiation via `new` or generics) are still presented to the programmer.

[0] https://github.com/phoe/cafe-latte

Condition system in Java: https://github.com/phoe/cafe-latte

phoe then said "Notice that no one mentions that this way they also managed to drag a lot of Lisp programmers about halfway back to C++."