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Comment by phyrex | Hacker News Reader

I loved Coast and wrote at least one production app with it (and very quickly and pleasantly at that), but it needs to be said that swlkr is the only developer, and he seems to have mostly moved on to Janet (https://janet-lang.org/). Case in point, the last real updates to Coast were 2 years ago, and - unlike other Clojure libraries - not because this project was /finished/.

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Yeah, I did move on, but if someone were to pick up the torch, I would help out any way I can!

Id actually love to hear what made you move on, if you have a few minutes to spare!

He wrote a blog post about it https://swlkr.com/posts/clojure-isnt-for-me/

TLDR: He hated the Java part of Clojure

Yeah that’s the long and short of it.

I spent a lot of time in jvm land though, a few years of nights and weekends, but I finally learned that it wasn’t for me.

I’m a C (or rust or llvm or what have you, wasm?) person, not a jvm person.

Tried GraalVM?

I’ve tried graal and native-image, both are awesome.

clojure still relies on the jvm though, for repl things.

sci and babashka were interesting, but at that point I had already moved on to janet

The x86 monoculture has shaken around a bit. But surprisingly it seems there has been friction even on the JVM side, partly because of Docker style nonportable containers had time to cement in the x86 monoculture period.

Ja that is always like a little splinter in my brain as well. I hope I don't bring out the language-wars but I always wanted a Clojure-Like but with Golang. :) I just love the go ecosystem and statistically compiled binary ! You shipping one binary ! :) No need to edit XML files and "tune java servers"

Again, this is just my preference. YMMYV

There are a few projects that try todo this like this one: https://github.com/mattn/golisp

But it seems abandoned.

I keep staring projects like this, but I haven't found the right level to put a lisp in the Go stack.

I've done a runtime lisp, but it felt like programming a lisp isolated from everything that made Go, well, Go. I've done a simple lisp to generate Go AST to do codegen pre-1.18, but that's not a complete program.

I haven't found the place yet that feels quite like Clojure.

there is joker https://github.com/candid82/joker but you may as well use the small clojure interpreter instead

janet looks really really good ! I like the use of channels for m.t

Any good HTTP/JSON/Crawler examples or libraries ?

libcurl wrapper - https://github.com/sepisoad/jurl

json encoder/decoder - https://github.com/janet-lang/json

Not aware of any HTML parsers/traverses (if that's what you mean with "Crawler") but interfacing with C libraries is easy so grab any C library you'd like for that task.

biff (https://biffweb.com/) is a little more batteries-included but seems like a nice successor in this space

Its default stack includes an AppleScript-like language that compiles to JS (Hyperscript) and a “feature” that automatically deploys to production every time you save… Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

He made a similar framework for Janet lang in Joy Framework[1] and it's unironically a joy to work with. Joy is one of those tools that is almost enough to make you use a different language imo. Got it where it counts, but still minimal and low mental overhead.

[1]: https://joy.swlkr.com/

I'm surprised to hear that Janet is still alive and kicking!

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