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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

> Creating a language with the feel of a lisp, the environment of Smalltalk, and the concurrency of Erlang has been my dream for a long time.

Hey! Now there’s two of us! It would be interesting to compare notes. :)

After 20 years of really dedicated Smalltalk evangelism, I jumped out of that balloon a little over 10 years ago. Then I wandered in many strange lands embracing the polyglots “right tool for the right job” mantra. What I found was more like “here’s a lot of really mediocre tools; rarely is it crystal clear which if many is right for the job.”

A year or so ago, I built out an API server in Elixir (no Phoenix) and I’ve really loved it. Great community. I love that it’s built on basic fundamental principals, and not a bunch of edge cases. I’ve always wondered what some sort of mashup would look like. If I was independently wealthy I would tinker away at such a thing.

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"out of that balloon" -- I see what you did there. :)

I've not really thought about it beyond that it would be nice. I really wanted to love Smalltalk, but Pharo at least didn't run well on Arch for me, and I didn't much love the web frameworks/concurrency story. I will say that Seaside is probably what got me interested in Liveview in the first place though. So many "if only"s...the developer experience is amazing in Smalltalk though.

There's a lot that scares me about making languages and I've not studied it much. I've started reading through SICP though as a starting place. Writing a basic scheme interpreter (and future compiler/JIT compiler) as an image-based language (with change tracking) to make it interactive from the get-go seemed to be as far as I made it, maybe basing it on an existing Scheme, but tacking on preemptive scheduling sounds hard. But so is making a language and entire development environment. :)

Shoot me an email though if you'd like to chat (in my profile, also username@gmail.com), not 100% sold if this is something I'd want to take on in the future or not, I really wish it already existed and someone better than me had already made it. :-D

>> Creating a language with the feel of a lisp, the environment of Smalltalk, and the concurrency of Erlang has been my dream for a long time.

Have you looked at LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang), by one of Erlang's co-creators, Robert Virding? (No Smalltalk-like environment, but 2 out of 3 ain't bad, right? :-) )

https://lfe.io/

>> Creating a language with the feel of a lisp, the environment of Smalltalk, and the concurrency of Erlang has been my dream for a long time.

>Hey! Now there’s two of us! It would be interesting to compare notes. :)

Please make this happen. :)

Sure. Just need that “independently wealthy” thing to fall in place. Are you donating?

I have a cunning plan to become independently wealthy. Should come to fruition real soon now. :)

Perhaps an IDE for LFE would be a place to start? Does such a thing exist?

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