web-development-with-clojure VS janet

I actually did build something basic following the book Web Development With Clojure (https://github.com/jumarko/web-development-with-clojure), but honestly the way the code snippets were presented in the book were sometimes difficult to use if trying to follow along and build it yourself.

I think you could probably get code from different chapters from their git repo, but then you're not doing it yourself - you are instead trying to read diffs to understand what's new and figure out why it has been changed.

My experience has been that there is no complete guide, tutorial, or example that is kept current and provides every detail such that you can follow it and learn. I'm sure with enough concerted effort, one obviously can learn it... but there will be some trial and error and some guesswork. Normally that's fine, but it slows the process compared to other tech stacks and their guides.

The Clojure community is nice and helpful, but they're all busy doing real work (rather than teaching). Even the book I mentioned is not yet complete and has been in progress for over two years I think.

Seems like a perfect use-case for Janet. (https://janet-lang.org/) A fast minimal VM like Lua, but even more extensible than Lua by being a "Lisp" with macro and C extension capabilities. Not a true Lisp, it's very pragmatic and performance-oriented. But it keeps the good stuff.

You might be looking for: https://janet-lang.org/

It comes with a build tool `jpm` which installs dependencies globally by default, but you can have it be installed in your project folder as well.

I like Clojure, but I never had any good opportunities to use it other than for a few small hobby projects. It is unfortunate that it is so huge with tons of dependencies and no simpler native implementation. I started looking at various LISPs and Schemes to find something lighter to use instead and ended up settling for Janet that I think is Clojure-like enough to be comfortable to use, but in a small native binary with no dependencies and can be embedded in other native programs. I am sure for big, real, projects that Clojure makes more sense, but for my hobby projects and scripts I do not think I will install it again. I am still happy for the things I learned from learning Clojure. It was a real eye-opener for an old OO-programmer.

https://janet-lang.org/

One might also check out Janet for quick scripting tasks.

https://janet-lang.org

Thanks!

I thought about another multiplatform, homoiconic, highly compact language: https://janet-lang.org/ (takes 803 kb on my machine).

It has no types though.

Racket is great, and if you like it you might find Rash interesting:

https://rash-lang.org/

Janet and Gerbil Scheme are also worth a look:

https://janet-lang.org/

https://cons.io/

Point here is that, for instance Janet language does not have cons / pair type but tuple (and so is lispoid, not lisp), but clearly this is sufficient for macros & hence seamless language construction: all you need is to be a lispoid although being a lisp gives another useful feature.