shen-cl VS with-c-syntax

> but what sub-languages are we talking about? I only see a library with helper functions and macros. That's Common Lisp, not a derivative.

If your language is a DSL factory, the line between your language and DSLs naturally blurs. If https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax exists, does it mean that C is a DSL of Common Lisp, given a good enough standard library? If https://github.com/calyau/maxima exists, does it mean that Maxima is just Common Lisp with more maths? If https://github.com/Shen-Language/shen-cl and https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ exist, does it mean that Shen and Coalton are just a fancy way of writing Common Lisp in an immutable way? If https://github.com/froggey/Iota exists and we can play sdlquake on Mezzano, does it mean that LLVM-IR is a dialect of Common Lisp?

The above series of questions is not meant to be fully credible - it's meant to be food for thought.

Working with Shen (CL implementation) and trying to get the simplest interop example possible to work.

It's kind of a long story but really what I'm trying to do is write my backend in Shen which is another programming language which was written as a layer on top of common lisp, but unfortunately does not have native support for web (yet), sooo unfortunately I have to write the server in cl and then use the shen-cl interop to launch from shen.

> but what sub-languages are we talking about? I only see a library with helper functions and macros. That's Common Lisp, not a derivative.

If your language is a DSL factory, the line between your language and DSLs naturally blurs. If https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax exists, does it mean that C is a DSL of Common Lisp, given a good enough standard library? If https://github.com/calyau/maxima exists, does it mean that Maxima is just Common Lisp with more maths? If https://github.com/Shen-Language/shen-cl and https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ exist, does it mean that Shen and Coalton are just a fancy way of writing Common Lisp in an immutable way? If https://github.com/froggey/Iota exists and we can play sdlquake on Mezzano, does it mean that LLVM-IR is a dialect of Common Lisp?

The above series of questions is not meant to be fully credible - it's meant to be food for thought.

More to the point of how simple (and easy) defmacro is compared to syntax-case and syntax-rules, I like another fare post: https://fare.livejournal.com/189741.html If you're as smart as fare, it "isn't too hard to translate it".

Though I concede this case could be analogous to trying to write a Doubly Linked List in Rust. So I'd more like to see a concrete case you have in mind where the tradeoffs are squarely against CL. Like, the loop macro is more complicated than any I have written myself, but you can break it down, and it's not that bad -- I think Norvig's version is pretty neat to study: https://norvig.com/paip/loop.lisp This project (and it's not the only one!) adding C syntax to CL https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax I think is more complicated than loop, and is sort of where I'd put the level of "complicated things" at that I'd like to see an example from the Scheme world that clearly shows defmacro's deficiencies on some metrics. (Fewer bugs? Easier to add new features to? Shorter code? Faster performance either at compile time or runtime or both? Easier to understand or faster to implement for people with similar levels of skill in the language?)

Lisp has served as an inspiration to so many programming language designs, Javascript included, that saying a language feature isn't really unique to Lisp is a bit like saying that The Lord of the Rings is just a bunch of fantasy clichés. It's true in some sense, but it also conveys a deeply flawed understanding.

Here[1] is a fun example of what's possible that would be difficult to do in many other languages without essentially just giving up and dumping the C style code in a string and calling some sort of eval on it and that is very much not the same thing.

[1] https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax/