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Comment by nudpiedo | Hacker News Reader

This is a complete and absolute hack and I love it. When reading the README file of their github it is possible to see how "impure" pragmatic decisions were made like for loops and not supporting proper recursion. I wish there would be more projects like this one porting lisp runtimes to more and more hardware.

In the other hand the racket lisp behind the scenes _generates_ the assembly code based on some of the scheme primitives rather than porting its whole Racket runtime there, which in spite of not being the same as running a lisp in the NES hardware is still impressive.

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This reminds me of when the Infocom folks moved from the functional MDL to the micro-friendly ZIL, while keeping much of the syntax of the former: http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/what-is-zil-anyway.html

Most Lispers and some Schemers are quite pragmatic in that regard. With the former favouring OOP and looping over recursion and the latter using imperative code when it matters.

With developer mindshare flocking to the Haskell view of FP, for the Lisp family, only the Clojure users seem to still hold purity in high regard.

Purity isn't in contrast with pragmatism; what Haskellers refer to as purity is referential transparency.

You can still do this kind of work in Haskell as well. It is a great imperative language.

Though as someone who has written assembler compilers in Common Lisp... it's felt relatively easy to do in CL. I've only heard people talk about writing control software for drones from Haskell. I have no idea how one would do that in practice though.

Here is a blog about assembling 6502 code in Haskell: http://www.wall.org/~lewis/2013/10/15/asm-monad.html

  With the former favouring OOP and looping over recursion

Not my experience at all, fwiw.

While I will not try to debate your experience, I will provide some extra context for my previous assertion:

You cannot program in CL without using the CLOS. Most CL books go into great detail explaining it and the MOP, they are also full of looping constructs, even using GOTO. The only exceptions are Graham's books.

In open source, it is frowned upon to use recursion as TCO is not part of the standard. Some functions are even inlined for better performance.

You can program perfectly fine in CL without using CLOS.

TCO is not part of the standard, but most implementations have it. All the widely used implementations have it. People use it and it is certainly not frowned upon.

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