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Comment by rasur | Hacker News Reader

In what way is this clojure inspired? (Just curious.. Does it need the JVM, or is it a brackety/syntax thing?)

(author of Pixie here)

It's mostly in syntax and the naming of functions. Our current though process is that we'll default to Clojure syntax/semantics where possible, but if the language will be faster or more flexible without a given aspect of Clojure's design we're pretty quick to adopt it.

Pixie (1) is a Clojure-like language that is written in rpython and is run via pypy (python jit), the advantages being fast startups (Clojure compile some libraries on startup which doesn't make it very suitable for writing CLI). This particular article is about running Pixie on the Raspberry Pi, check the Pixie language page to learn more about Pixie itself.

Pixie does not require the JVM.

> In what way is this clojure inspired? is it a brackety/syntax thing?

Have you looked at the article? It shows an example (that uses brackets and indeed looks like Clojure/lisp syntax).

[1]: https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie

> Have you looked at the article?

Well, yes briefly (it lead to the question by saying it was clojure inspired), but I didn't have time to delve fully into the minutiae, as am at work and for some reason they keep expecting me to do stuff /shrugs/

It's distinct [features][1], mainly immutable data structures and transducers.

Pixie runs over -RPython- PyPi.

(The bracket "thing" is not a Clojure feature, it is lisp)

[1]: https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie#features

I thought brackets ( eg '[' or ']' ) are Clojure syntactic sugar. I don't recall much use of them in Common Lisp (or Scheme), though I'm happy to be shown the error of my ways.

AFAIK, you are correct. In Clojure, square brackets are used for vector literals. Furthermore, Clojure uses vectors in some places (e.g. parameter lists in function definitions) that most Lisps use regular lists in order to help make those things more visually distinct.

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