lumen VS femtolisp

I agree! That’s actually not a jeer, it’s one of my main criticisms of lisp. You don’t need lists to have lisp. In many respects it works better without them; https://github.com/sctb/lumen proves it, since hash tables and arrays are the fundamental data structure. They have to be, because that’s the only way lumen can run in JS or Lua.

Every time I can’t delete the first element of a list in lisp (I.e. del x[0] in the python sense) I get annoyed with racket.

The reason I look past it is because the benefits are so good that they outweigh the annoyances. I wouldn’t trade it away.

Where h is the raw function for hyperapp, not a macro.

I'd intended to develop my own mini-lisp with the same syntax, but got sidetracked by other projects. Maybe someday I'll get back to it. (Currently, I'm deep in the weeds trying to learn how to write a dependent typed language that compiles to javascript.)

[0]: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

It wasn’t my idea, too. It was Scott Bell’s. I’m not sure if he thought of it or got it from somewhere else, but it’s shockingly effective.

If you want to try it out for yourself, give Lumen a spin: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

> What do you develop with Arc usually?

I try to use Arc for as much as possible. We wrote our TPU monitoring software in it: http://tensorfork.com/tpus

Eventually I became frustrated with Racket's FFI. So I eventually made my own arclike language called elflang: https://github.com/elflang/elf

... which itself is a fork of Lumen (https://github.com/sctb/lumen) by Scott Bell.

The performance is good enough to run a minecraft-style game engine: https://i.imgur.com/iyr0YrB.png which was satisfying.

Nowadays I've been trying to implement Bel, mostly for the challenge of it than for any practical reason.

> I like how the "html" and "css" part was embedded in that "news.arc" file. Do you think that VIM script will highlight and lint the "css" part of an "arc" file?

Nope. https://i.imgur.com/o9aUG6j.png

But it has one very important feature: it can properly highlight atstrings: https://i.imgur.com/wO4f742.png

It's probably hard to tell, but the "@(hexrep border-color*)" would normally be highlighted as if it were a string. Arc has a feature called atstrings, where you can use @foo to reference the enclosing variable "foo". It can also call functions, e.g. "The value of 1 plus 2 is @(+ 1 2)" will become "The value of 1 plus 2 is 3".

Not mine! That was all Scott Bell. It's forked from Lumen: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

But, I did make an interactive tutorial here: https://docs.ycombinator.lol/

If you have any questions about it, I'd be happy to answer. This stuff is pure fun mixed with a shot of professionalism.

For what it's worth, as someone with narcolepsy, I relate quite a lot to your chronic pain. (https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1392213804684038150) For me, it mostly translated into wandering aimlessly from job to job, since I thought no one would have me. I hope that you find your way -- there's nothing wrong at all with taking it slow and spending years on something that takes others a few months. Everyone is different, and it's all about the fun.

You could go the opposite route, and run Lisp in your favorite language. Here's a Lisp in JavaScript and Lua: https://github.com/sctb/lumen

Integration is easy because there's no integration. You can just call whatever functions you'd normally call.

Not at all. I've been thanking Scott for making lumen every thanksgiving for several years now. https://github.com/sctb/lumen

I just close the issue immediately after opening it. :)

> In short, Julia is very similar to Common Lisp, but brings a lot of extra niceties to the table

This probably because Jeff Bezanson, the creator of Julia, created a Lisp prior to Julia, which I think still exists inside Julia in some fashion

https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp

Well let's flip this around: do you think you could write a performant minimal Python in a weekend? Scheme is a very simple and elegant idea. Its power derives from the fact that smart people went to considerable pains to distill computation to limited set of things. "Complete" (i.e. rXrs) schemes build quite a lot of themselves... in scheme, from a pretty tiny core. I suspect Jeff Bezanson spent more than a weekend writing femtolisp, but that isn't really important. He's one guy who wrote a pretty darned performant lisp that does useful computation as a passion project. Check out his readme; it's fascinating: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp

You simply can't say these things about Python (and I generally like Python!). It's truer for PyPy, but PyPy is pretty big and complex itself. Take a look at the source for the scheme or scheme-derived language of your choice sometime. I can't claim to be an expert in any of what's going on in there, but I think you'll be surprised how far down those parens go.

The claim I was responding to asserted that lisps and smalltalks can only be fast because of complex JIT compiling. That is trueish in practice for Smalltalk and certainly modern Javascript... but it simply isn't true for every lisp. Certainly JIT-ed lisps can be extremely fast, but it's not the only path to a performant lisp. In these benchmarks you'll see a diversity of approaches even among the top performers: https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/

Given how many performant implementations of Scheme there are, I just don't think you can claim it's because of complex implementations by well-resourced groups. To me, I think the logical conclusion is that Scheme (and other lisps for the most part) are intrinsically pretty optimizable compared to Python. If we look at Common Lisp, there are also multiple performant implementations, some approximately competitive with Java which has had enormous resources poured into making it performant.

While it uses an Algol inspired syntax, it has the same approach to OOP programing as CLOS(Common Lisp Object System), with multi-methods and protocols, it has a quite powerfull macro system like Lisp, similar REPL experience, and underneath it is powerered by femtolisp.

For a real answer, other replies have already mentioned KiloLisp, but there's also femtolisp. Also, not exactly what you're asking for, but Maru is a very compact and elegant self-hosting lisp (compiles to x86).

Take a look at femtolisp It has some low level features and is quite small. There is also a maintenance fork at lambdaconservatory

A fun Julia easter egg I recently discovered.

Running 'julia --lisp' launches a femtolisp (https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp) interpreter.

Reminds me of the femtolisp README :)

Almost everybody has their own lisp implementation. Some programmers' dogs and cats probably have their own lisp implementations as well. This is great, but too often I see people omit some of the obscure but critical features that make lisp uniquely wonderful. These include read macros like #. and backreferences, gensyms, and properly escaped symbol names. If you're going to waste everybody's time with yet another lisp, at least do it right damnit.

https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp