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Correct. Syntactically it's more similar to Clojure while the runtime is, to my understanding, heavily inspired by the non-JIT versions of Lua.

As a language, it's fine. I found the documentation pretty good and the language makes some very sensible decisions but I can't bring myself to use it for anything serious. The lack tooling makes it challenging.

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I have used janet for embedding into another program as an alternative to lua and it was great for that case. Lua doesn't have good tooling either, and I didn't have anything to gain from a tiny runtime and I wanted more powerful tools for making a DSL in there. It worked out perfectly, I'd do it again.

Yeah, I'm not saying there aren't usecases that it would excel at (sounds like you found one!), I just haven't really had a problem that I thought it would yet. I've come really close though

I personally like Fennel a lot, but it’s not at the point where I would build something large on top of it. The language itself is solid, but like you said, there’s not a lot of tooling.

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