Hacker News Reader

Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

A nice thing about Lisp (that is harder to achieve in other languages) is that you can make the text of your program look like it is written in a declarative rather than in an imperative (or a functional) language. (I think that's what is meant when they say that Lisp is perfect for creating DSLs.)

View on HN

Harder in other languages except Forth. While creating DSLs is easy enough in Lisp, Forth is more of a DSL construction kit than a programming language. Which is why there are roughly as many dialects as implementations.

Forth... so alluring, yet so scary. I am afraid doing it will make me do great things no one else can understand and maintain. :)

I've been working on one of my own that attempts to bridge some of the gaps between Forth and the rest of the world, feel free to take her out for a spin:

https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl

I presume you would know of factor, curious what you think of it.

Sure, I've played around with it; still too complex and too static due to being natively compiled.

I've mostly given up on the idea of driving applications from a higher level language, I much prefer having C as a foundation and then embedding a more dynamic language that I have full control over. I like to call it reverse FFI :)

So Guile, Lush, Lua, Tcl would be the other likely candidates. I do use Python but more as a remote control over C.

Yep, more or less. Though if you flip through Snigl's README, there's already plenty in there that these languages will never be able to do.

I used to do that in Common Lisp, which has the only FFI I've come across that's even nicer than Python's. But it's backwards; once you're in a high level language, it's inconvenient and expensive to reach down.

It makes a lot more sense to me to drive the whole process from C; not only do you have direct access to C; you also get to control the embedded world from the outside, which is about as meta as it gets.

If you want a FFI that's arguably even nicer, look at PicoLisps:

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Call_a_function_in_a_shared_libr...

(setq Display (native "/usr/lib/libX11.so.6" "XOpenDisplay" 'N ":0.0"))

Just in case my comment came out as "why are you working on Snigl ?" ... I was thinking aloud on what are some of the other languages that you might like. Snigl sounds pretty cool and fun.

No harm done; I'm doing this with or without, because it has to be done.

I wrote about this recently: https://plforums.org/practice/minimal-features-required-for-...

This was posted today, illustrating the power of Common Lisp read macros (not to be confused with regular macros):

https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax

Gambit Scheme has SIX (Scheme Infix eXtension) for C style imperative code.

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/doc/gambit.html#Scheme-i...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com