Jerrica Alternatives

Jerrica reviews and mentions

• Parenscript
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2023

  I love Parenscript specifically, and in general I love--as the Hylang project puts it--"Lisp lipstick on [language]" projects. I understand the sentiments that Parenscript isn't really Lisp and that "you could just use [real Lisp X]", I do. However, Javascript really did eat the world and sometimes being able to sling it really is essential.

  Math envy often means people downplay syntax when discussing programming languages, but the S-expression syntax is why I fell in love with Lisp all over again as a more experienced developer. S-expressions and macro based tooling give me the confidence to refactor in a much more experimental and improvisational manner. I can move logic around or invert the order of calls without having to worry if the change will leave the code in a broken state. Yes, VS and other IDE's offer similar features (especially as they embrace AI) but in my experience they just aren't as powerful, flexible, or--most importantly--reliable as decades old tools that exploits S-expressions.

  Parenscript brings this confidence and power to Javascript. And it isn't just syntax. The project goes out of its way to give little "quality of life" semantic boosts like supporting a proper "loop" macro and multiple value return.

  I use Parenscript extensively for my hobby projects[^1] and games[^2] and it's been great.

  Don't let the slow pace of dev scare you off. It's a cultural difference in the Lisp adjacent communities. There's this radical idea that projects can asymptotically reach "done" because the language is sensibly forward compatible and the projects have clear goals and aren't all agile managed CV-bait nightmares that want to grow into all encompassing "frameworks". At work, I comfortably rely on Common Lisp projects that haven't been touched in more than a decade because they do what they are supposed to regardless of how the calling enviroment around them changes.

  [^1]: https://github.com/trevorjay/Jerrica

• Show HN: Jerrica, a 100% scheduled, Web Audio native, MOD player for JavaScript
  1 project | /r/patient_hackernews | 27 Oct 2022
  1 project | /r/hackernews | 27 Oct 2022
  1 project | /r/hypeurls | 27 Oct 2022
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Oct 2022
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