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Comment by chrsig | Hacker News Reader

> SBCL has definitely proven itself to be a good companion to explore the generation of domain-specific machine code. I don’t know of any other language implementation with that kind of support for interactive programming and machine code generation (and inspection). FWIW, I believe LuaJIT + dynasm will soon be comparable.

Julia! It's very lispy, actually, but it does a very good job of exposing different layers of parsing & compilation through llvm

see the interactive utilities documentation[0] -- there are a few macros and functions, prefixed with code_, that output the generated code

[0] https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/stdlib/InteractiveUtils/#In...

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I really don't understand what would make someone say that Julia is lispy. People say that about R as well, but I don't see that either.

To me, lisp is many things, but the first thing it is is s-expressions. Most/many languages have macros. Lisp is just particularly good at those...

Julia[0] shares features with Dylan[1] which was an attempt at designing a Lisp-like language without s-expressions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)#L...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)

From the Julia side, Common Lisp [0] feels like writing Julia. Both the code itself and the development experience.

[0] https://youtu.be/y5Rn41fPIuQ

I didn't interpret OC as calling Julia lispy, as much as saying that Julia is matched to SBCL's interactive machine code generation and inspection. I don't have a dog in that particular fight; I've barely touched either language.

Except, macros. I have never seen macro wizardry come anywhere near SBCL without homoiconicity.

edit: pre-coffee reading comprehension, apparently. The word lispy is _right there_ in OC.

To clarify, I was trying to say that both

- the julia runtime does a good job competing with sbcl with regard to interactive code generation. I'm not familiar enough with sbcl (or julia, really) to rank one over the other -- but from what I have seen, they're in the same ballpark.

- julia feels like a lisp to me, due to many features of the language and how much it emphasizes repl based development. I can respect that others may not feel the same -- it's a subjective matter.

I'm not heavily invested in either -- I just think they're both nifty.

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