I'm building a new lisp. It's not ready to show yet, but we're aiming for "Someone running Windows using notepad.exe can still have a good dev experience." We've been calling this "devex" (developer experience) and set out to specifically focus on this area. Mostly out of curiosity, but also to see whether it's a fruitful approach in general.

It uses npm as a package manager, so the setup instructions to install any library are the same: "npm install foo --save". You can then open a REPL, type (require 'foo) and begin using that library. There's also a Homebrew formula for setting it up, for those who don't have npm, so library authors could take the same approach and offer a way to "brew install" their library. I imagine we'll provide a mechanism to make this easy.

It took about six months of focused effort to achieve that, and no one should feel obliged to go through the trouble. But it was doable, and it's pretty exciting to see it work.

Performance was the other objective, which also turned out to be achievable. It comes with several example programs, one of which is a software rasterizer that pushes 7 million pixels/sec. It's 200 lines of code, entirely Lisp. Seeing a smooth 60fps without spending any effort at all on optimization was very interesting.