Fennel absolutely rocks for creating games. It integrates with TIC-80 (open source fantasy console) and also Love (game engine) and PICO-8. Lots of blog articles on getting started. Check it out!
Kexoth 8 hours ago [-]
If so can you reccomend (link here) some of the resources which got you started?
Can't say I made anything worth mentioning. There are some bigger templates available that I am sure do more useful things, but I prefer something small enough that I can see what is going on.
Worked fine even for getting things to run in LoveDOS, a port of some older Love2D version to MS-DOS. In practice compilation was a bit too slow for comfort, so a better way was to pre-compile the fennel-scripts to Lua and just run those.
I installed some LSP server for fennel that comes with optional built-in code completion for both Love2D and TIC-80. Works well in emacs.
3036e4 3 hours ago [-]
Fun project, but I wonder how difficult it would have been to get Fennel to run in Guile-Lua? The article did not get into any details or even mention if it was seriously attempted. Fennel supposedly supports "Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, or LuaJIT" so a Lua implementation that is "in the realm somewhere between Lua 5.1 and 5.2" is not obviously not supported?
TIL you can configure Emacs with Brainfuck. This is so appropriate and I can’t think of a better language to use.
rayiner 10 hours ago [-]
This joke landed better before folks unleashed the horrors that are XML config files.
jhoechtl 15 hours ago [-]
What makes a modern Lisp? I am aware of Fennel and Jannet. Anyone havng experience with one of those or another one I am not aware of?
tmtvl 14 hours ago [-]
Common Lisp, which I would consider the most modern, has convenience features which most other languages (even other Lisps) lack. CLOS, macro expansion, and, of course, the condition system.
setopt 10 hours ago [-]
Do you consider Common Lisp more "modern" than say Scheme or Racket?
As far as I know, the CL spec hasn’t been updated for 30+ years, and most of its design is far older.
tmtvl 10 hours ago [-]
Don't know much about Racket, but CL has type dispatch:
(But note that deftypes aren't allowed to recurse.)
CL also has first-class support for debugging with things like describe, step, and trace built-in.
EDIT: Yeah, the CL spec dates from 1994 and a bunch of things which we would expect nowadays (networking, POSIX,...) are provided by external libraries rather than being part of the spec, but in various ways CL is way ahead of its time.
pjmlp 4 hours ago [-]
And yet we're still catching up on having features from Allegro Common Lisp and LispWorks more widespread across mainstream languages, where Java and .NET ecosystems are the closests in terms of IDE capabilities, graphical debugging, runtime introspection, JIT and AOT on the same package,.....
Which goes to show how many lessons the industry failed to learn on those 30+ years.
terminalbraid 10 hours ago [-]
Which lisps lack a macro expansion system?
tmtvl 10 hours ago [-]
R7RS (small, at least) doesn't seem to have macro-expand. R6RS also doesn't appear to have it.
terminalbraid 9 hours ago [-]
So the modern scheme specs. (I'd argue putting small in there is unfair considering its intent and the actual implementations of r6rs do offer expansion, e.g. chez, guile, racket)
soegaard 4 hours ago [-]
The name `macro-expand` is from Common Lisp.
Scheme R5RS, R6RS and R7RS all have macro systems.
In R5RS has a pattern/template based system (syntax-rules).
In R6RS the system has both patterns, templates and procedural macros.
The most modern system is Racket though. See `syntax-parse`.
kryptiskt 9 hours ago [-]
R6RS has syntax-case macros which is superior to Common Lisp macros in every respect, they're both hygienic and can be used to implement a sloppy macro system if one so wishes.
ashton314 7 hours ago [-]
`syntax-rules` is very good and you can do a whole lot with them. However, you are limited to template -> pattern transformations, and there are plenty of macros that you cannot write this way. (E.g. anything requiring a predicate on the source syntax that you can't express in the template language, etc.) For that, you need the full power of procedural macros.
EDIT: syntax-case -> syntax-rules; R6RS specifies the latter—I believe the former is a Racket construct equivalent in power to `syntax-rules`.
Straw 6 hours ago [-]
I think the parent meant that R6RS has `syntax-rules`, which has enough power to implement CL `defmacro` as well as `syntax-case`.
ashton314 5 hours ago [-]
My mistake: R6RS has `syntax-rules`, not `syntax-case` as far as I can tell. However, `syntax-rules` and `syntax-case` are equivalent in power. [1]
It does not have the same power as `defmacro`: you cannot define general procedural macros with `syntax-rules`, as you are limited to the pattern-matching language to compute over and construct syntax objects.
Janet (with one l) is modern because it is, well, new. It doesn't need to carry the historical baggage of Common Lisp. It has many data structures, a concurrency model, it is suitable for functional programming and for object-oriented programming. It has libraries for common tasks and is well documented.
ritenuto 12 hours ago [-]
> Janet (with one l)
Typo, it should be: “with one n” (as the earlier commenter wrote “Jannet”). It took me a while to parse this, I was searching for the nonexistent “l” embarrassingly long.
xlii 14 hours ago [-]
Having experience with many IMO it's all about value added. There might be concurrency, message passing (Janet) od global scope isolation (Fennel). Personally I had difficulty getting into Fennel, but no problems incorporating Janet into my flow even though the author is the same. I'm not a fan of hygienic macros though.
I would add Clojure to the modern Lisps, too, which I find the most feature rich (even though had much more blast writing Janet).
TacticalCoder 14 hours ago [-]
> I would add Clojure to the modern Lisps, too, which I find the most feature rich (even though had much more blast writing Janet).
Yup. Clojure may not be the most lispy Lisp but it reaches: it works on top of the JVM (with super easy Java interop), it transpiles to JavaScript and I also use it to write script using Babashka (GraalVM/AOT native Clojure interpreter which starts in milliseconds, avoiding JVM startup time [notoriously slow for regular Clojure programs]).
Being able to share code between Clojure and ClojureScript is really sweet.
Clojure(Script) / Emacs (CIDER) / eglot (LSP client for Emacs): life is good!
neutronicus 10 hours ago [-]
I know the homoiconicity purists hate the additional braces in Clojure, but I consider the literal vectors and hash tables a pretty big win over `#()` and the mess that is dealing with hash tables in CL.
foxygen 5 hours ago [-]
"homoiconicity purists" is probably the wrong term, as Clojure is homoiconic. Probably "Lisp purists" would fit better.
anthk 7 hours ago [-]
Emacs has cl-lib. If you come from Common Lisp you will be 90% at home, minus closures and a few rough edges. Still, PAIP code has been ported to Elisp:
I thought we had closures now with lexical scope being added in the last few releases
anthk 4 hours ago [-]
Then paip-el should be updated for the latest cl-lib compatibility standards.
For sure it would be far less boilerplate code, except for the strings formats of course.
psychoslave 14 hours ago [-]
Sorry, but what is Fennel?
Lyngbakr 14 hours ago [-]
Fennel[0] is a Lisp-like language that transpiles to Lua. It was originally developed by Calvin Rose (author of Janet[1]), but is now maintained by Phil Hagelberg (author of Leiningen[2]).
Fennel is a lisp-like programming language that compiles to Lua, offering a more concise syntax while maintaining full compatibility with the Lua runtime.
campak 11 hours ago [-]
came thinking somehow fennel the seed extended Emacs
Rendered at 22:32:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
FWIW there are blog posts from the same author of the Emacs setup: https://andreyor.st/tags/game1/
Can't say I made anything worth mentioning. There are some bigger templates available that I am sure do more useful things, but I prefer something small enough that I can see what is going on.
Worked fine even for getting things to run in LoveDOS, a port of some older Love2D version to MS-DOS. In practice compilation was a bit too slow for comfort, so a better way was to pre-compile the fennel-scripts to Lua and just run those.
I installed some LSP server for fennel that comes with optional built-in code completion for both Love2D and TIC-80. Works well in emacs.
https://fennel-lang.org/setup
As far as I know, the CL spec hasn’t been updated for 30+ years, and most of its design is far older.
CL also has first-class support for debugging with things like describe, step, and trace built-in.
EDIT: Yeah, the CL spec dates from 1994 and a bunch of things which we would expect nowadays (networking, POSIX,...) are provided by external libraries rather than being part of the spec, but in various ways CL is way ahead of its time.
Which goes to show how many lessons the industry failed to learn on those 30+ years.
Scheme R5RS, R6RS and R7RS all have macro systems. In R5RS has a pattern/template based system (syntax-rules). In R6RS the system has both patterns, templates and procedural macros.
The most modern system is Racket though. See `syntax-parse`.
Racket improves on Scheme: its macros are fully hygienic whilst not being limited to template -> pattern transforms. See https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/macro-transformers.html
EDIT: syntax-case -> syntax-rules; R6RS specifies the latter—I believe the former is a Racket construct equivalent in power to `syntax-rules`.
It does not have the same power as `defmacro`: you cannot define general procedural macros with `syntax-rules`, as you are limited to the pattern-matching language to compute over and construct syntax objects.
[1]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/stx-patterns.html#%28...
Typo, it should be: “with one n” (as the earlier commenter wrote “Jannet”). It took me a while to parse this, I was searching for the nonexistent “l” embarrassingly long.
I would add Clojure to the modern Lisps, too, which I find the most feature rich (even though had much more blast writing Janet).
Yup. Clojure may not be the most lispy Lisp but it reaches: it works on top of the JVM (with super easy Java interop), it transpiles to JavaScript and I also use it to write script using Babashka (GraalVM/AOT native Clojure interpreter which starts in milliseconds, avoiding JVM startup time [notoriously slow for regular Clojure programs]).
Being able to share code between Clojure and ClojureScript is really sweet.
Clojure(Script) / Emacs (CIDER) / eglot (LSP client for Emacs): life is good!
https://github.com/yfuna/paip-el
The original one:
https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp
Paradigms of AI Programming:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Peter_No...
[0]https://fennel-lang.org
[1]https://janet-lang.org/
[2]https://codeberg.org/leiningen/leiningen