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KamilaLisp – A functional, flexible and concise Lisp

by tluyben2 on 3/2/24, 7:29 AM with 54 comments

  • by tluyben2 on 3/2/24, 7:30 AM

    Impressive feature list with a book to learn the language.

    Featured on Arraycast:

    https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode74-kamilalisp

  • by shrubble on 3/2/24, 5:54 PM

    This is the second Lisp, in addition to APRIL, which combines Lisp concepts with APL concepts. Wonder if that is going to be a trend in the future?

  • by bloopernova on 3/2/24, 4:53 PM

    Slightly related question:

    Do any editors have a "translator" kind of tooltip or panel that explains what each symbol does in languages like APL or KamilaLisp?

    I was thinking about how I'd go about learning the various symbols involved in such a language, and I learn best by reading and modifying existing code, so something that helps me understand what I'm looking at would be nice.

  • by lispm on 3/2/24, 5:38 PM

    The KamilaLisp repository contains a version of ABCL (Armed Bear Common Lisp for Java) and of Fricas (a computer algebra system written in CL).

    What are those used for?

  • by trymas on 3/2/24, 3:44 PM

    I thought I have seen this name…

    malbolge-lisp: https://github.com/kspalaiologos/malbolge-lisp

    HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28048072

    She’s a genius prodigy.

  • by anthk on 3/2/24, 4:34 PM

    Check out stutter from the Computational Beauty of Nature too:

    https://github.com/gwf/CBofN

        cat data/demo.lisp | ./bin/stutter
    Have a look on the file on how integers and aritmetics are implemented.

    The books explains that, but is not free. But you can get it somewhere else.

  • by hislaziness on 3/2/24, 3:06 PM

    Inspired by MalbolgeLISP which was a lisp written in Malbolge.

  • by karmakaze on 3/2/24, 3:51 PM

    It would be helpful if the Features were separated by language vs library. I don't know what to make of

      No memory side effects, all collections are persistent.
    This can't be relevant when the objects referenced by these collections are mutable.

  • by hyperbrainer on 3/2/24, 2:27 PM

    This could actually be nice for code golf.

  • by mm007emko on 3/2/24, 2:39 PM

    Looks great, however it's licensed under GPL. Does it mean that ALL programs in that language have to be GPL as well?

  • by behnamoh on 3/2/24, 7:32 PM

    I said this in another thread too, but the problem with Lisp is that it's sorta bundled with Emacs, so if you want to use LISP's powerful REPL you really have no choice other than learning Emacs. Essentially, Lisp is not just a "language"; it's a whole system designed to explore programming ideas. It includes the IDE, the minimal syntax, REPL, compiler, etc. All of this together makes "Lisp" the powerful and enlightening tool that people talk about.

    I think the other "inconveniences" of Lisp could be more tolerable for beginners if learning the language didn't require learning a new IDE (or OS, depending on how you define Emacs!). But at that point you'd have to forego a major benefit of using Lisp (its REPL); you'd be back to writing "dead" programs, not image-based "live" ones.

    Another problem I've faced with Lisp is lack of good documentation (except for Racket, but then again, Racket doesn't have Common Lisp's powerful REPL). Every website that teaches Lisp is in ugly HTML+CSS-only style, compare that to the more user-friendly websites of other languages.

    Then there's the issue of up-to-date learning material. Aside from the fact that there are very few resources to learn Lisp, the ones that are available are too old too. "Practical Common Lisp" (2005), "Common Lisp Recipes" (2015), "ANSI Common Lisp" (1995), etc.

    I like the philosophy of (s-exp) but modern lisps have ruined its simplicity for me by introducing additional bracket notations [like this]. It's confusing for me as a beginner to distinguish between (this) and [that], and honestly goes against the whole idea of "code and data look the same" motto.

  • by James_K on 3/2/24, 5:44 PM

    > 0.3.x.y where a bump of x signifies a breaking change, while the bump of y signifies a non-breaking change

    If only regular version numbers had some way to encode this relationship.