Why Fennel? (a programming language that runs on the Lua runtime)

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Awesan@reddit

Looks like a fun project, but honestly I cannot take seriously anyone who wants to write lisp for anything serious. I have tried doing this myself and it was miserable.

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igna92ts@reddit

There are several millions of lines of lisp code in production. Do you think no companies use or have used lisp? What was it you had problems with?

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Enip0@reddit

It's like an unspoken contract at this point that any time someone mentions lisp, someone will say it's terrible and someone will say it's actually good after you get used to it.

Now, I got introduced to it via emacs, so I had a 'soft' introduction as I could copy paste enough to get things to work, and rarely I had to understand much. Eventually I realized that if I do spend some time my experience with emacs would be better, so I did that. Then I decided I liked it and started learning clojure, which I love..

Point is, different strokes for different folks? It needs time/dedication to learn? I don't know, but some people like it and it makes them fast so there you have it.

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Awesan@reddit

Fair enough. Like I said I definitely got used to it and build a big system in it. I also made my own lisp variant compiler and used it for serious projects. I can be productive in it. But the few nice things about it are just not worth the hassle IMO.

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Enip0@reddit

what do you find to be a hassle about it?

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SolidGrabberoni@reddit

How was it miserable?

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JustinsWorking@reddit

I’ve seen some really cool stuff where people used a language like lisp to dramatically simplify some very complicated and highly coupled code.

I tried to find the talk they did about before responding but couldn’t. - basically the problem when structured using a functional language similar to Lisp was actually simple and straightforward, where as the cpp code was riddled with checks and interdependencies.

Ive never seen anything like it since, but I’ve been chasing that dragon for years now because it was honestly the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

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Gibgezr@reddit

Yes, but while you can write very simple Lisp code to do some things elegantly, it invariably involves massive amounts of recursion..very, very SLOW recursion.
I used to work with a Lisp programmer doing AI stuff, and he hated my Lisp code because it was "ugly", written like a C/C++ programmer. But my code ran literally 100x faster than his, because I understood what the interpreter was spitting out to the CPU in both cases.

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JustinsWorking@reddit

I don’t recall all the details, so I can’t be specific in this case but this was much more a situation where it went from impossibly hard to debug and reason about even for the senior developers who built it; you could probably ask a junior programmer to work with it safely due to how simple and logical the system was.

Iirc the performance was either the same or better, but the real magic was taking a system that was prohibitively complicated and fragile to one that was powerful and intuitive… god I wish I could find the talk they did after, it was for such a niche little project though.

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zombiecalypse@reddit

People have done just that successfully for decades, so maybe that's a personal thing?

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flmng0@reddit

I feel you there. I love it now, myself, but it takes a very specific use-case to make it click.

I couldn't even articulate why I love Lisp-likes now if I tried, but my most recent use case was re-writing my NeoVim configuration.

The ability to make my own syntax when I needed to was very useful, although definitely a downside for large teams

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totallytroy@reddit

As a gamedev programmer, I see the benefit. Lua is usable anywhere and lisp is great at making dsls, which is very useful.

For example, I believe Naughty Dog uses their own flavor of lisp and they use it for a wide array of things AI, Animation, Scripting etc

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Linguistic-mystic@reddit

I find Moonscript more bitchi’

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nelmaven@reddit

Everytime I look at a Lisp language, I think giving it a chance. But then, it's like, you gotta switch to Emacs, or use a complicated plugin that messes all your keybindings, and setup the REPL, and it's just a pain to deal with.

I guess it's just beyond my grasp.

Like the idea of the project though.

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PM_ME_UR_ROUND_ASS@reddit

Fennel actually doesn't require Emacs at all - you can use any editor and the CLI repl is super simple to setup (just install with luarocks and you're good to go).

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