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Comment by frompdx | Hacker News Reader

The arguments I have seen are based on Janet using arrays/tuples rather than cons cells. Here is the author addressing this on reddit a while back. https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/aqwedz/janet_i...

The debate continues in the thread. Either way, I think Janet is very useful for situations where you want something lisp like and also want/need small executables. I've experimented with it quite a bit and have found it really useful for putting together cli apps. The sh package is really useful for gluing together other shell programs. https://github.com/andrewchambers/janet-sh

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I don't understand the rationale of people tying the state of being a "real Lisp" with cons cells. As if that were the only contribution lisp has made, instead of homoiconicity, REPL-focus, etc.

The polymorphic sequence abstraction in Clojure is the definitively modern way to manipulate data structures in a lisp family language nowadays. It retains `first` and `rest` as abstracted `car` and `cdr`, but in return all collections (vectors, lists, sets, and hashtables) work transparently with it.

What a waste of time... It's like the "smug lisp weenies" of ages past somehow slipped into the modern era.

Janet is a nice embeddable Lisp (that is: it belongs to the Lisp family of languages). I've been meaning to play with it, but concluded that the lack of (robust) stdlib would make it hard to use for standalone applications. Was it a problem for you in practice, or is the small stdlib enough for CLI apps?

I do wish there was an http client/server component in the stdlib. That's probably my biggest gripe at the moment. I think things are evolving in the right direction though. Recent updates have added an event loop module and have improved the net module. I can see a future where Janet becomes very useful for network programming. I think http in stdlib plus some growth in the third party package ecosystem will make Janet more viable.

I mostly stick to using it as a gluing tool for shell scripts for now. So for my purposes it was fine for CLI apps assuming you are gluing together other cli apps. I could have avoided some gluing if Janet had it's own http client. I spent a while trying to dig into some of the packages and to be honest they just aren't there yet. I really wanted to experiment with building a desktop GUI in Janet but I found that it was too much effort to get started. Cljfx (clojure) and racket/gui both work out of the box with minimal effort.

"I mostly stick to using it as a gluing tool for shell scripts for now." You might like https://github.com/babashka/babashka then.

I've been using Janet quite a bit for small CLI apps.

The stdlib is quite enough for basic CLI apps, especially when you use PEGs.

Janet's event loop also makes it very handy for issuing a lot of subprocess calls.

Janet has basic HTTP servers and clients, and there is an effort to shore it up there.

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