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Comment by JavierFlores09 | Hacker News Reader

Has Clojure become the new base for Lisp-like languages? What does it got going for it that people seem to want its specific flavor of lisp? Just asking since I've also seen the Clojure talk about Jank[1] recently and it has gotten me interested.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHgApFhevrQ

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Coming from Ruby, wanting to learn a Lisp, there are so many things in Clojure that make the language much easier for me to understand, compare to other Lisps. Simple things like first/rest vs car/cdr make it much more ergonomic and easy to grok, IMHO.

Yeah I alluded to this in my comment, but I think the dict literals just make for a much easier on ramp for someone familiar with Python or JS (or JSON, which is increasingly unavoidable for even C++ devs like me).

All Clojures are Lisps, but not all Lisps are Clojures. :)

It's immutable, has bracket syntax for data structures, and most of its standard library has very sensible naming and nil-sentinel conventions. The result is that it's astonishingly easy to read and write. The data structure sharing under the hood also keeps it performant. Finding and obtaining packages with its build systems is also easy.

Scheme gets close but has some odd naming conventions and completely wild conventions for packages (SFRI, etc). CL's entire library is full of incredibly odd names first established at the very advent of computing. Using it can be...dense. And inconsistent, since it's not purely functional and has no dedicated data structure syntax.

the data structure literals are really pleasant to work with, and oh how I miss get-in and update-in in every other language (with all the ecosystem of functions that follow that pattern and are built to work with it)

Hash table literals.

Also, living on a host language has always been part of its ethos. So if you want to be Lisp on C++ or Lisp on Rust, you’re going to be more ideologically aligned with the Clojure crowd than the Common Lisp crowd who pinch their nose and say ALGOL when you mention either.

SBCL is written in C and have FFI baked in

http://www.lichteblau.com/sbcl/doc/manual/sbcl/Foreign-Funct...

Maybe it’s too much work to write a full lisp vm in another language when it’s easier to write a loader.

Nothing will ever be a base for lisps because theyre too malleable and the temptation ro create your own is too high

Anyway my recent favorite is Carp:

https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp

Serious projects in it? Zero

Same, I needed a Lisp that was typed for the AI era where Clojure's dynamism didn't fit the bill. Carp was a perfect fit, and I managed to create a few projects with the help of Deepseek

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