Not my project. Just a thing that happens to be small and elegant and maximally “correct”, in its particular design direction. Community is small, creator is level-headed. Somehow, it does feel like exactly the language a Janet’s firmware would be written in. It brings me joy that such a thing exists.
First encounter with a Lisp, I see.
Lisps aren’t like Algols, where delimiters are visual cues for structure; what you’re meant to do is ignore them, and focus on indentation instead. The advantage of having them at all instead of doing Python’s thing is it’s obvious how the parse tree will turn out, which gives macros the power to not suck. Additionally, Parinfer.
A language where I have to type tokens then ignore them isn’t exactly the platonic ideal of a scripting language eh?
How is that different from the spaces/tabs you type at the beginning of a line though?
Well, it isn’t worse, and at least it’s whitespace I don’t have to look at. Lisps also have to be indented, otherwise the code you write is unreadable, so that’s not really a great argument.
You do have to look at it though: it takes up space on the left margin, pushing your code to the right. Plus, a decent syntax highlighter will make a Lisp’s parens about as subtle as whitespace. (You might call that cheating, but remember, what we call “text” is just a sequence of voltages etched on a silicon wafer; what we see on our displays is already a monumental abstraction.)