NewLisp | Hacker News Reader

NewLisp

newlisp.org

100 pointsdragonsh30 comments

Open articleView on HN

(Somehow) a competitor of NewLisp is Janet (https://janet-lang.org/). Syntax inspired in Clojure.

Janet seems to be a bit more optimistic as the last update is recent but NewLisp hasn't been touched for 2 years.

I quite like Janet. That and Joker (which is a Clojure linter/interpreter).

The latter was new to me.

https://github.com/candid82/joker

As a tentative but enthusiastic Lisper interested in Clojure but not Java, I like that Joker is implemented in Go, and its pragmatic approach (such as feature parity with Clojure being a non-goal).

There is also https://github.com/borkdude/babashka which uses Clojure to create scripts

Small, fast and seems to gave great interop with C libs. This has some real potential for smaller scripts/utils I think.

Did anyone make anything interesting with this yet?

It's been out a long time. I was playing with it in 2012 and I think it'd already been out a long time at that point. I think there is a blog post somewhere about a university student programming candy crush (or some other game) the night before it was due in NewLisp. Racket might also be worth a look again at some point. It's certainly heavier, but has a much larger community.

Picolisp is also really awesome and weird like NewLisp, but is really only for Unix. It is also small, but has plenty of features, and has been in development and supported since the late 80's. It is all written in C or Assembly (can't remember which one it is currently written in) and has built-in support for logic programming and all sorts of other things. It uses web browser for GUI, and can interop with Java and C.

Michael Fogus (blogger, Closure book author, and all around language nerd) wrote a fascinating article called "fleunpunkt lisps" (forgive spelling) that covers four really bizzare lisps (NewLisp, Pico Lisp, Wasp Lisp, and Arc). The summary is that they're neat and tried to do something revolutionary, but ended up just being odd.

That link seems to be here:

http://blog.fogus.me/2011/05/03/the-german-school-of-lisp-2/

Which was discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2509696

> Michael Fogus (blogger, Closure book author, and all around language nerd) wrote a fascinating article called "fleunpunkt lisps" (forgive spelling)

Was it "Fluchtpunkt Lisp" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45838440-fluchtpunkt-lis...)? I tried searching for it, but this is probably the closest I've seen.

Here it is. You'll see that phrase a bit lower in the page. https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove001/read

it was issue number 1 of the newsletter.

http://readevalprintlove.fogus.me/

Read-Eval-Print-λove is an N-monthly newsletter of original content and curation about the Lisp family of programming languages and little-languages in general.

Yeah, that is it. My German spelling is no bueno.

IEEE 754 Flucht-punkt. :)

Indeed great and very simple interop with C libs. I have looked and played with CL, Scheme, pico lisp, Clojure and Janet but keep coming back to Newlisp, because 'it just works' (for me), documentation is very good and has a lot of inbuild functions. Regarding the C interop I made some bindings for duckdb, termbox and libui at https://github.com/luxint.

You would probably enjoy TXR Lisp.

http://nongnu.org/txr

Years ago we developed a web framework for newLISP called Dragonfly and used it for several projects. http://dragonfly.apptruck.de/

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279266

Has the fun ever left the Lisp languages?

Somewhat OT, but can anyone remember a language that was posted around here a while (maybe a few months ago?) I seem to recall it was a quite nice, modest-looking little language, I think a lisp (but I'm not even sure about that), but not a scheme or a common lisp, with inline C interop. I meant to have another look at it but I've completely forgotten what it's called.

Another one for my list at https://taoofmac.com/space/dev/LISP

(Feel free to suggest others, I’ll be updating this in a couple of hours)

I'm not convinced about the choice for the behaviour of `cons` in NewLisp.

Or the forced pass by value, or the lack of closures, or the namespaces kluge...

Or the choice of dynamic scoping - although judging from your username I suspect you might not mind that one as much ;)

> Or the choice of dynamic scoping - although judging from your username I suspect you might not mind that one as much ;)

     ;; -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

I don't understand the motivation for this comment kludge; why can't there be a proper top-level form for this:

   (lexical-binding t) ;; or whatever

Lisps should not be ferreting out code generation semantics from comments; that idea should have died with Turbo Pascal.

Newlisp is to Lisp what the New Monkees are to the Monkees.

Newlisp is to Lisp what New York is to York.

Larger and with more features, but ultimately lacking the simplicity and elegance of the much older version?

A lot of things can be said about CL, but elegant is not one of them. Battle tested and practical, but also full of warts when you look under the shining armour.

Just do what everyone else does and write your own language on top of it to solve your problem.

This is the new Coke of programming languages

Last update 5/19. Is it really new?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com