I bet Fennel code (especially my Fennel code) looks extremely cursed to experienced Lisp devs lol

my brain is completely fried after doing a DailyProgrammer in Fennel @_@

https://pastebin.com/i1cbWYXD

I think I’m getting the hang of Lisp’s weirdness though – a little bit. Fennel is definitely the perfect gateway into Lisp for me:

• it’s easy to write imperative code
• it’s very small and simple
• under the surface it’s basically just Lua, and I know Lua decently well

I’m using fennel-ls as my LSP and it’s… workable. it definitely helps a lot more than having no LSP

I think my ideal language, though, would probably be Lua with its quirks ironed out (0-indexed tables, !=, variables are local by default, etc.) and Rust’s macro system added on top

one of the reasons why I’m interested in Lisps is that in theory they don’t need to have this problem. they could have an extremely simplistic Lua-like core language with a minimal amount of ideas needed to conceptualize how the language works, and then have a modular standard library on top of that for extending it and making it really nice to use and full of modern features like classes, list comprehensions, etc.

and then when newer, better ideas are invented, those modular systems could be swapped out for new ones, while still keeping the core language compatible with The Old Ways

obviously Lua can kinda do this already, but the advantage that Lisp-like languages have is that they have macros, letting them do all kinds of weird shit

so anyway that’s why I’m so interested in Fennel - because it seems like the best of both worlds: the core language is as simple and easy-to-learn as Lua (because it basically is Lua) but on top of that, just enough Lisp has been added to allow macros to be created, theoretically letting it become just as expressive and nice-to-use as Python (minus the Lisp syntax)

I really really wish that programming languages could just change their entire design with each major version whenever it’s possible to make things more elegant - instead of adding features on top and supporting bad legacy decisions

but… that’s how you get the Python 2 → Python 3 transition problem. so I guess at a certain point, elegance has to take a back seat to practicality

I still don’t like it though lol

the only thing worse than supporting legacy software, is not supporting legacy software

new pronoun notation: appending a number to be used as a weight for random pronoun selection

it/its:10 she/her:5 they/them:1

10/16 it/its, 5/16 she/her, 1/16 they/them

maybe include 0 as a "i won't get mad at you for using this but avoid it"

it/its in a she/her:0 way

Congratulations to all, on the release of Unicode 17.0. The "distorted face" is now officially standardized as \u1FAEA

y'all, my husband (not a tech guy) just managed to stumble innocently into Windows' biggest, deepest, darkest black hole of legacy hacks:

"I was making textfiles with explanations of different D&D stats, str, dex, etc, but it wouldn't let me name a file con..."

this is the energy i bring to software development

Just ate some cheese

the USA is such a beautiful country

@pharmafemboy answering E activates the trap door to the piranha pit

I can’t wait until Linux is as easy to use as Windows and I never have to deal with this kind of platform compatibility problem again. also I bet Windows support is a massive headache for FOSS devs anyway

I gave up and just set everything up in WSL lol. and of course everything worked perfectly there with no effort at all

it’s weird how some languages work perfectly on Windows and others are basically only usable on Linux

@pork_soda ooh that’s tempting! to be honest I have this irrational dislike of auto-generated code or auto-generated config files unless I know exactly what they’re doing, and from what I understand that’s how VIsual Studio works, right? but it does sound like it’s a much nicer environment for compiling things than having to figure all of that out by hand

although I have thought about trying a compiled language. in the past I tried Rust and was extremely confused and overwhelmed by it lol. it was my first statically-typed language as well as my first real attempt at learning a compiled language and I think that was a mistake. I did manage to make a pretty cool project in Rust but I barely understood any of the compiler errors I was getting and developed superstitions about how to not anger the compiler lol

so I’ve been thinking of trying something less advanced, though I’m not totally sure what yet. but right now I’m currently wrestling with both Löve/Lua and potentially learning Fennel (a Lisp-like that transpiles into Lua) so I definitely have my hands full as it is