This post is refreshing - smells of the pre AI discussions on the internet. A new language, a new syntax, heavy debate with people who have spent years writing code. I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.
> I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.
In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]. Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person.
[1] Second-to-last, actually, seeing as there seems to be a new homepage right now.
Perhaps requiring webauthn credential for any post/comment with a whitelist of permitted webauthn hardware devices which must have touch/interaction enabled.
I'd have to read the FIDO specs, however the only place I've seen webauthn hardware pinning in the wild is with Azure AD/Entra which is ostensibly based on token GUID. If this is the only enforcement mechanism available, it's spoofable.
> In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]
Given that they wrote their goodbye post using LLMs and gave up after such a short amount of time, I don't take that at face value the same way I don't believe AI layoffs
This is something I think about a lot, especially how one could pull it off without tearing down anonymity online. Having some sort of "proof of humanity" is a hard problem to solve.
The amazing thing about AI is that you don’t even need AI superfans to shoehorn it into a conversation that doesn’t even touch on AI. Detractors will do it for them.
Heh, every time you show a average developer lisp for the first time the reaction is the same. Little do they know conditionals, GC, REPLs, macros and more comes from the syntax and language dreamed up in the 50s/60s.
It’s been a few months, but I built a tool by Janet lang to communicate with an LLM via HTTP. Of course, I probably had Claude Code write it for me. It turned out better than I expected.
I was really impressed by how small the executable file was. I’d only ever done web development with Node.js up until then.
A C macro with literals that lacks referential transparency:
#define MULTIPLY(x, y) x * y
int result = MULTIPLY(2 + 3, 4); // 14
Not knowing what something means does not make it bad, which is what I'm assuming you meant given how you phrased your sentence.
Having a shared language of patterns and problems that occur in programming is a good thing. Ridiculing such terminology on the basis of "that group of programmers sure are weird" is pointless and counter productive.
somehow i also never got the idea around these languages like lisp. I remember i studied them in school - but i quickly forgot and never got around to relearning it.
It took me probably 5 years of writing Clojure before it clicked. Once you get used to structural editing and repl driven development, it’s really hard to go back to syntactic languages.
It’s kind of like in treesitter style editing, where you can “swap these two arguments,” “select this function,” “wrap this in a try block” with a single keyboard command… but way more standardized and granular. Plus with the ability to execute anything you highlight
All that and then you realize you can store code as data (since it’s just a data structure) and run data as code.
I think most programmers don’t realize how arbitrary the difference is between code and data until they get used to using LISP.
Probably depends on whom you are asking. For me the essence is (1) having functions or procedures as the basic building blocks, not classes. (2) Having all the utility and higher order functions you need to deal with the functions and procedures first idea. (3) Having a very powerful syntax, that allows great semantic editing and is never ambiguous. Oh and can actually be extended in useful ways, without having to wait for a committee to decide upon "the one syntax to rule them all".
The idea is that instead of having to learn tens of different syntactic constructs with subtle and often arbitrary differences, you just have parentheses and use them to build everything.
This is such a undervalued benefit, once you've learned s-expressions, you can basically learn a bunch of languages without having to learn completely new syntax. It'll be slightly different, with different idioms and names, but a hell of a lot easier than doing the same across every "It's like C but 50% of the syntax is different actually" language out there, which is most of them.
Is the syntax really the stumbling block for most languages? Would Rust's lifetimes or Swift's isolation rules be easier if they used more parens? Are the scoping rule differences between Emacs Lisp and Scheme easier to comprehend because the syntax is similar?
Frankly, though, I think lispy community has benefited from being smaller. For example, even though the now ancient Design Patterns already warned programmers to prefer composition over inheritance, the OO programmers still created 15 levels deep hierarchies.
There is also fennel, earlier language originally by same developer, that is similar, but compiles to, and is fully implemented in, Lua. No standard library of its own so missing many nice things like the parser library from janet, but it is good for writing scripts for things that embed Lua.
Seems some of the listed advantages for Janet would also apply for tcl (small/simple, easy to learn, embeddable, usable as a shell, great for domain specific languages). It would be interesting, to me at least, to see a fan of Janet compare the two.
I've only used Tcl briefly, mostly for automation which it's great at. But it's a Algol-like imperative language, doesn't have any type of macros and makes everything based on strings (which makes sense for automation) instead of lists, with all the tradeoffs that comes with.
It seems easier to figure out what the similarities are, because I think they're pretty few, they seem to differ more than they are similar.
> Instead of regular expressions, Janet’s text wrangling is based around parsing expression grammars. Parsing expression grammars are simpler, more powerful, and more predictable than regular expressions.
I would dispute that this is the case. In PEGs, alternatives are not commutative, unlike in regular expressions. This can lead to quite frustrating debugging. While a valid choice, the advantage over REs is overstated.
PEGs are just soooo much easier to read than regexes for anything more complex than a few words or single line matching. REs are a hammer that tempts people to see everything as a nail, but once one progresses beyond that phase one usually wants as few REs as possible.
The non-commutavity is a feature, not a bug. It allows you to have clearly defined parsing for grammars that would traditionally be considered ambiguous.
Came here for this comment. Janet would score positively in my mind if the evolutionary dead-end PEG were replaced with a grammar parser that is known to work under all circumstances.
I've been drawn into the Janet posts that surface every once in a while here on HN, but found the otherwise highly praised "Janet for Mortals", not being for mortals at all.
> I've been drawn into the Janet posts that surface every once in a while here on HN, but found the otherwise highly praised "Janet for Mortals", not being for mortals at all.
I'm surprised: the language is very straightfoward, simple, very few rules to remember. It's a Lisp but with a very small surface area.
I mean, compared to other languages, Janet really is easier to lean, so I'm surprised that the book for it is difficult (did not read the book, but familiar-ish with the language. I don't have anything but praise for it, TBH).
I used Hy for a long time, then tried Janet, and ultimately realized that I wanted more batteries included but didn't want Python... So I forked https://github.com/rcarmo/go-joker and am tinkering with it until it does all I want.
If it was called [Something] Lisp, Lisp enthusiasts would complain that it’s not a lisp because it does not use linked lists as the primary data structure.
I know that Lisp has lots of paranthesis and I don't have enough experience with Lisp at all.
But from the looks of it, Janet has some great ideas like the one that @ramblurr shared here about sandboxing ("Disable feature sets to prevent the interpreter from using certain system resources. Once a feature is disabled, there is no way to re-enable it.")
Lisp from my understanding is incredibly polarizing and many people love it and many people hate it and that's fine, but at a certain point wouldn't it feel repetitive for statement like this and I am unsure of how healthy discussion about programming concepts can be done this way.
There are so many interesting things from lisp-y languages like Janet and Julia is technically lisp-y too and Julia's compilation to GPU is awesome and Nim too which can compile to C/C++/JS!
It's just so many interesting concepts overall in programming that paranthesis don't seem a concern to me as the underlying concept can be translated to something else, like sandboxing feature, transpilation to GPU or multiple targets!
And there are many unique concepts in non-lispy languages like golang (cross-compat, portability with static binaries), elixir (concurrency!) too.
It's just good to see the amount of innovation within programming from all spheres of influence :-D
While I do not like the excess of parentheses of LISP and similar languages, their syntax is very consistent and predictable.
I am much more annoyed by the random syntax inconsistencies of most popular programming languages, which are either caused by original language design mistakes, or, more frequently, by the late addition of some features that were not planned in the original language, so they had to be squeezed in with the help of various ugly workarounds.
While during the last years I have not used much LISP like languages, there have been times when I used them a lot, for several years, in scripting applications, e.g. the LISP variant of old AutoCAD, the Scheme-like scripting language of the Cadence EDA applications, or the scsh Scheme dialect that is usable for replacing UNIX shell scripts.
In all cases, these languages allowed a greater productivity associated with rarer bugs than the more popular scripting languages, like Python, Perl, TCL, bash.
While aesthetically I might prefer the look of a Python program, for solving a practical production problem I would prefer to write scripts in one of the LISP derivatives. Obviously, the productivity in various programming languages depends a lot on individual preferences and previous experiences.
Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure!
How fast is it?
Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit. I wish this project had been a success (or something similar to it): https://readable.sourceforge.io/
Also I don't think static typing is really optional for me at this point.
> Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure!
Just FYI, many of these are also done in Scheme and its derivative Racket. They kept lambda (but even Python did that), but progn -> begin, setq -> set!, car -> first, and so on.
> Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit.
I have pretty mixed feelings at this point. I don’t mind it for normal programming, but when I do numerical programming (physics models, etc.) you often get extremely long and verbose expressions that are IMO difficult to parse compared to the math-like infix operator notation used in other languages.
Actually not all those are ancient customs, and not all that Janet uses is newer.
In the first description of the language LISP, from March 1959 (AIM-008), John McCarthy had used the names "first" and "rest", instead of what later will be called "CAR" and "CDR".
The names of "CAR" and "CDR" appear to have come from the students who worked at the practical implementation of the LISP interpreter on an IBM 704, and unfortunately we have remained stuck with them, like also with other features that were intended only for a temporary use, until being replaced in the "final version" (which was abandoned).
Out of those renames, I agree with car->first and progn->do. setq is ugly, but I think using def is maybe questionable. lambda I would have just kept the same.
Syntax is not that important to me. I prefer Python style indentation, but its really not that important - its just something to get used to for me.
Is static typing that important for a scripting language? From the intro to the book:
> And to be clear, I’m not going to try to convince you to bet your next startup on Janet, or even to use it in any sort of production setting. But I think it’s an excellent language for exploratory programming, scripting, and fun side projects.
Would be nice if some kind of "scripting" language
be as fast as a compiled language, but without
ruining the syntax. Just about 99% of the languages
that are shown, have a horrible syntax. Syntax is not
everything, but most language designers don't understand
that syntax also matters. So tons of horrible languages
emerge. Nobody will use those languages, so 99% of them
will die off quickly.
can't there theoretically be a language which transpiles to Janet to get all the benefits without additional paranthesis too?
Not sure if such transpilation would have a perf hit though, I hope somebody responds who knows about it more.
I don't deny that syntax matters itself too but there are some ideas of janet like sandboxing and other features which seem to me to be worth implementing in other languages too.
Personally, I would be really interested in a language like lua/wren which can transpile to Janet too.
This post is refreshing - smells of the pre AI discussions on the internet. A new language, a new syntax, heavy debate with people who have spent years writing code. I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.
> I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.
In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]. Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person.
[1] Second-to-last, actually, seeing as there seems to be a new homepage right now.
[2] https://www.techspot.com/news/111698-digg-relaunch-fails-two...
Perhaps requiring webauthn credential for any post/comment with a whitelist of permitted webauthn hardware devices which must have touch/interaction enabled.
I'd have to read the FIDO specs, however the only place I've seen webauthn hardware pinning in the wild is with Azure AD/Entra which is ostensibly based on token GUID. If this is the only enforcement mechanism available, it's spoofable.
> In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]
Given that they wrote their goodbye post using LLMs and gave up after such a short amount of time, I don't take that at face value the same way I don't believe AI layoffs
lobste.rs uses a web-of-trust referral system. I guess it still involves a moderator killing off bad nodes, but it seems to scale well
yeah but I can't post there because I don't know anyone with an account and frankly CBA traipsing around looking for someone who has an account.
does seem like more things will have to go this way though
+1, if anyone wants to help me I'd be honored. mail me at ramon(@)odeva(.)nl
> a community online where AI isnt allowed.
This is something I think about a lot, especially how one could pull it off without tearing down anonymity online. Having some sort of "proof of humanity" is a hard problem to solve.
The amazing thing about AI is that you don’t even need AI superfans to shoehorn it into a conversation that doesn’t even touch on AI. Detractors will do it for them.
Yes, it’s similar to Trump. But that makes sense right? AI is changing the world drastically, and so is Trump and his fascist friends.
> a new syntax
How is the syntax new?
It looks like lispy - see the outer parens in the examples given.
Heh, every time you show a average developer lisp for the first time the reaction is the same. Little do they know conditionals, GC, REPLs, macros and more comes from the syntax and language dreamed up in the 50s/60s.
It’s been a few months, but I built a tool by Janet lang to communicate with an LLM via HTTP. Of course, I probably had Claude Code write it for me. It turned out better than I expected.
I was really impressed by how small the executable file was. I’d only ever done web development with Node.js up until then.
> But by allowing you to unquote literal functions, Janet makes it possible to write macros that are completely referentially transparent.
These lisp guys really get excited over very abstract things. If you say this to an average person on the street they will probably try to run away.
> very abstract things
A C macro with literals that lacks referential transparency:
Not knowing what something means does not make it bad, which is what I'm assuming you meant given how you phrased your sentence.Having a shared language of patterns and problems that occur in programming is a good thing. Ridiculing such terminology on the basis of "that group of programmers sure are weird" is pointless and counter productive.
you ever try to explain object oriented programming languages and their benefits to the "average person on the street"?
somehow i also never got the idea around these languages like lisp. I remember i studied them in school - but i quickly forgot and never got around to relearning it.
It took me probably 5 years of writing Clojure before it clicked. Once you get used to structural editing and repl driven development, it’s really hard to go back to syntactic languages.
It’s kind of like in treesitter style editing, where you can “swap these two arguments,” “select this function,” “wrap this in a try block” with a single keyboard command… but way more standardized and granular. Plus with the ability to execute anything you highlight
All that and then you realize you can store code as data (since it’s just a data structure) and run data as code.
I think most programmers don’t realize how arbitrary the difference is between code and data until they get used to using LISP.
Probably depends on whom you are asking. For me the essence is (1) having functions or procedures as the basic building blocks, not classes. (2) Having all the utility and higher order functions you need to deal with the functions and procedures first idea. (3) Having a very powerful syntax, that allows great semantic editing and is never ambiguous. Oh and can actually be extended in useful ways, without having to wait for a committee to decide upon "the one syntax to rule them all".
The idea is that instead of having to learn tens of different syntactic constructs with subtle and often arbitrary differences, you just have parentheses and use them to build everything.
This is such a undervalued benefit, once you've learned s-expressions, you can basically learn a bunch of languages without having to learn completely new syntax. It'll be slightly different, with different idioms and names, but a hell of a lot easier than doing the same across every "It's like C but 50% of the syntax is different actually" language out there, which is most of them.
Is the syntax really the stumbling block for most languages? Would Rust's lifetimes or Swift's isolation rules be easier if they used more parens? Are the scoping rule differences between Emacs Lisp and Scheme easier to comprehend because the syntax is similar?
Average programmer too /j
Frankly, though, I think lispy community has benefited from being smaller. For example, even though the now ancient Design Patterns already warned programmers to prefer composition over inheritance, the OO programmers still created 15 levels deep hierarchies.
There is also fennel, earlier language originally by same developer, that is similar, but compiles to, and is fully implemented in, Lua. No standard library of its own so missing many nice things like the parser library from janet, but it is good for writing scripts for things that embed Lua.
https://fennel-lang.org/
Always nice to see janet getting some attention.
shout out to one modern feature: sandbox
"Disable feature sets to prevent the interpreter from using certain system resources. Once a feature is disabled, there is no way to re-enable it."
https://janet-lang.org/api/misc.html#sandbox
Seems some of the listed advantages for Janet would also apply for tcl (small/simple, easy to learn, embeddable, usable as a shell, great for domain specific languages). It would be interesting, to me at least, to see a fan of Janet compare the two.
I've only used Tcl briefly, mostly for automation which it's great at. But it's a Algol-like imperative language, doesn't have any type of macros and makes everything based on strings (which makes sense for automation) instead of lists, with all the tradeoffs that comes with.
It seems easier to figure out what the similarities are, because I think they're pretty few, they seem to differ more than they are similar.
> Instead of regular expressions, Janet’s text wrangling is based around parsing expression grammars. Parsing expression grammars are simpler, more powerful, and more predictable than regular expressions.
I would dispute that this is the case. In PEGs, alternatives are not commutative, unlike in regular expressions. This can lead to quite frustrating debugging. While a valid choice, the advantage over REs is overstated.
PEGs are just soooo much easier to read than regexes for anything more complex than a few words or single line matching. REs are a hammer that tempts people to see everything as a nail, but once one progresses beyond that phase one usually wants as few REs as possible.
The non-commutavity is a feature, not a bug. It allows you to have clearly defined parsing for grammars that would traditionally be considered ambiguous.
"small peg tracer"[1] is really helpful for breaking down a PEGs operation
[1] https://github.com/sogaiu/small-peg-tracer
Came here for this comment. Janet would score positively in my mind if the evolutionary dead-end PEG were replaced with a grammar parser that is known to work under all circumstances.
I've been drawn into the Janet posts that surface every once in a while here on HN, but found the otherwise highly praised "Janet for Mortals", not being for mortals at all.
Personally I get hung up on the macro syntax being near the beginning, but there is so much valuable stuff past that
> I've been drawn into the Janet posts that surface every once in a while here on HN, but found the otherwise highly praised "Janet for Mortals", not being for mortals at all.
I'm surprised: the language is very straightfoward, simple, very few rules to remember. It's a Lisp but with a very small surface area.
I mean, compared to other languages, Janet really is easier to lean, so I'm surprised that the book for it is difficult (did not read the book, but familiar-ish with the language. I don't have anything but praise for it, TBH).
> not being for mortals at all.
I had that with Haskell. Although, while Haskell is too hard for me, I actually like its syntax.
Janet seems to be Lisp 2.0, so the syntax is lispy.
Does embedding Janet still lean on global state?
Previously (April 2023) | 140 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35539255
This got me thinking of Hy. I wonder how syntactically close they are; there might be an exploitable Python -> Hy -> Janet path here.
[0] https://hylang.org/
I used Hy for a long time, then tried Janet, and ultimately realized that I wanted more batteries included but didn't want Python... So I forked https://github.com/rcarmo/go-joker and am tinkering with it until it does all I want.
Maybe needs a (2023) in the title?
why is it called Janet? perhaps to prevent it to be identified with the acronym for Lots of Irritating Single Parenthesis?
It was named after the sentient computer system in the TV show "The Good Place"
A humourous clip: https://youtu.be/etJ6RmMPGko?si=W98LdG1jDdUCXsHV
Also mentioned in the GitHub repository:
> Why is it called "Janet"? Janet is named after the almost omniscient and friendly artificial being in The Good Place
https://github.com/janet-lang/janet#why-is-it-called-janet
If it was called [Something] Lisp, Lisp enthusiasts would complain that it’s not a lisp because it does not use linked lists as the primary data structure.
I know that Lisp has lots of paranthesis and I don't have enough experience with Lisp at all.
But from the looks of it, Janet has some great ideas like the one that @ramblurr shared here about sandboxing ("Disable feature sets to prevent the interpreter from using certain system resources. Once a feature is disabled, there is no way to re-enable it.")
Lisp from my understanding is incredibly polarizing and many people love it and many people hate it and that's fine, but at a certain point wouldn't it feel repetitive for statement like this and I am unsure of how healthy discussion about programming concepts can be done this way.
There are so many interesting things from lisp-y languages like Janet and Julia is technically lisp-y too and Julia's compilation to GPU is awesome and Nim too which can compile to C/C++/JS!
It's just so many interesting concepts overall in programming that paranthesis don't seem a concern to me as the underlying concept can be translated to something else, like sandboxing feature, transpilation to GPU or multiple targets!
And there are many unique concepts in non-lispy languages like golang (cross-compat, portability with static binaries), elixir (concurrency!) too.
It's just good to see the amount of innovation within programming from all spheres of influence :-D
While I do not like the excess of parentheses of LISP and similar languages, their syntax is very consistent and predictable.
I am much more annoyed by the random syntax inconsistencies of most popular programming languages, which are either caused by original language design mistakes, or, more frequently, by the late addition of some features that were not planned in the original language, so they had to be squeezed in with the help of various ugly workarounds.
While during the last years I have not used much LISP like languages, there have been times when I used them a lot, for several years, in scripting applications, e.g. the LISP variant of old AutoCAD, the Scheme-like scripting language of the Cadence EDA applications, or the scsh Scheme dialect that is usable for replacing UNIX shell scripts.
In all cases, these languages allowed a greater productivity associated with rarer bugs than the more popular scripting languages, like Python, Perl, TCL, bash.
While aesthetically I might prefer the look of a Python program, for solving a practical production problem I would prefer to write scripts in one of the LISP derivatives. Obviously, the productivity in various programming languages depends a lot on individual preferences and previous experiences.
The embeddability sounds very appealing. Does anyone have experience with using this somewhere one might traditionally reach for Lua?
I have built a markup language with embedded scripting in Janet. I originally tried to use Lua, but found the verbosity extremely frustrating.
Luxferre.top has some Janet based softwrae.
Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure!
How fast is it?
Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit. I wish this project had been a success (or something similar to it): https://readable.sourceforge.io/
Also I don't think static typing is really optional for me at this point.
> Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure!
Just FYI, many of these are also done in Scheme and its derivative Racket. They kept lambda (but even Python did that), but progn -> begin, setq -> set!, car -> first, and so on.
> Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit.
I have pretty mixed feelings at this point. I don’t mind it for normal programming, but when I do numerical programming (physics models, etc.) you often get extremely long and verbose expressions that are IMO difficult to parse compared to the math-like infix operator notation used in other languages.
I'm starting to prefer the s expression syntax when dealing with tree structures like json.
I wonder if we were raised on tree based algebra if math would be easier to do, or harder.
Like, solve for x.
Though this isn't too bad.Actually not all those are ancient customs, and not all that Janet uses is newer.
In the first description of the language LISP, from March 1959 (AIM-008), John McCarthy had used the names "first" and "rest", instead of what later will be called "CAR" and "CDR".
The names of "CAR" and "CDR" appear to have come from the students who worked at the practical implementation of the LISP interpreter on an IBM 704, and unfortunately we have remained stuck with them, like also with other features that were intended only for a temporary use, until being replaced in the "final version" (which was abandoned).
> Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit.
I use Parinfer, which allows me to edit Janet as if it was an indentation-based language.
Out of those renames, I agree with car->first and progn->do. setq is ugly, but I think using def is maybe questionable. lambda I would have just kept the same.
Syntax is not that important to me. I prefer Python style indentation, but its really not that important - its just something to get used to for me.
Is static typing that important for a scripting language? From the intro to the book:
> And to be clear, I’m not going to try to convince you to bet your next startup on Janet, or even to use it in any sort of production setting. But I think it’s an excellent language for exploratory programming, scripting, and fun side projects.
Are you aware of:
https://docs.racket-lang.org/sweet/index.html
Although, this here is a good idea:
"pass values from compile-time to run-time"
Would be nice if some kind of "scripting" language be as fast as a compiled language, but without ruining the syntax. Just about 99% of the languages that are shown, have a horrible syntax. Syntax is not everything, but most language designers don't understand that syntax also matters. So tons of horrible languages emerge. Nobody will use those languages, so 99% of them will die off quickly.
What would be a better syntax according to you? I have found Janet’s syntax very pleasant to work with as opposed to JavaScript, Lua or even Python.
can't there theoretically be a language which transpiles to Janet to get all the benefits without additional paranthesis too?
Not sure if such transpilation would have a perf hit though, I hope somebody responds who knows about it more.
I don't deny that syntax matters itself too but there are some ideas of janet like sandboxing and other features which seem to me to be worth implementing in other languages too.
Personally, I would be really interested in a language like lua/wren which can transpile to Janet too.
I guess you could transpile direct to Janet bytecode, and performance would be in theory the same as native Janet?
Excellent. Although I suspect the author of the programming language invented this Janet for all the perfect puns. Yes, Janet. No. Janet.