It doesn't work in my browser - which is understandable because my computer is ancient - but sometimes when I want a break from study in the library I'll spend thirty minutes on a library computer playing in bauble there. I might get around to trying to figure out how the thing works, but the graphics you can make just fiddling with numbers is wild.
For me, on a 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max, on MacOs 15.1.1, it appears to work in Chrome but in Firefox shows this error.
error: script:16:1: compile error: unknown symbol twist
in evaluate [lib/evaluator.janet] on line 81, column 7
in bauble-evaluator/evaluate [lib/init.janet] on line 8, column 12
It's neat to compare Janet to GNU Guile. Guile's original pitch is that it's intended to be easily used side-by-side with C. However, because it's an older language, it hasn't (to my knowledge) picked up newer sensibilities like having a package manager shipped with the language toolchain.
One thing I like about Guile is how much effort they've put into describing compatibility with the RNRS standards. Not sure how Schemey Janet actually is, but I'm curious to find out.
Which is really funny because that's basically exactly what fennel is, which was made by the same guy. I don't think he's written about it but fennel compiles to lua while janet is its own thing.
(it fits the definition of metaphor 'One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol' but it has the feel of people saying "my niece thought the floppy disk save icon is a refrigerator because that's where you save leftover food" not realising that it was a real piece of fun/cute hardware many moons ago).
The title made me believe it was just another AI assistant (thinking Janet from "The Good Place" - but for us non-dead people instead. Was pleasantly surprised to see it is a programming language and that the title was just a clever joke on that:
The Janet language is named after an immortal being in The Good Place who helps mortals navigate the afterlife, hence the title.
It kinda surprised me that they ship the language with a PEG (parsing expression grammer) instead of a basic Regex engine.
This has been my wish for any programming language that ships a Regex library by default to also include a capable PEG.
Janet's 'spork' module is kinda like their libc, and has a regex submodule; it's very likely to be installed.
Janet is my first exposure to PEGs, so nothing to compare against but I love how powerful and easy they are. I have a better grasp of them in only a few months than dabbling over 20yrs with regex.
Also there is quite a bit of The Good Place callbacks within the Janet community; numerous 3rd party modules are named after characters, for example.
I've read the book and I found it very fascinating and kind of playful, which actually makes learning the Janet program language much more fun. However, I found the documentation of the language lacking in many ways. Oftentimes there are functions or commands that are just there, but there's no example or explanation. or explanation as to what they do. In fact, there are a lot of those that I found in the book, but I couldn't find in the documentation. So this is one of the reasons I stopped learning Janet, even though I really like the idea of this language, and the fact that it has many sane defaults and similarities to mainstream languages instead of like adhering to archaic Lisp conventions. At the end of the day, it's not actually a LISP because it's not cons lists. And it is fine by me, but again, I found the language not fully documented.
Do you remember any of the functions/commands that were not documented? I'm semi active in the Janet community and would be able to work on improving the docs where its lacking!
I had exactly the same experience (minus reading the book). Often, I'd just see the function signature and no further explanation. I do realise that it takes a lot of time and effort to build up extensive docs, but it happened enough that I put it down and started looking for another Lisp that compiles down to a binary.
I couldn’t get into Janet, I’m not sure if this is a personal failing on my part. The only other Lisp I’ve spent any significant time in is Emacs Lisp, and everything in Janet seemed similar enough to that but just subtly different that I was always making silly mistakes. The PEG features were really compelling on paper but I found the syntax unwieldy and confusing. The documentation was complete in that it had descriptions of all the functions, but spartan in that it lacked examples or other helpful usage information. There didn’t seem to be any basic batteries included such as JSON parsing; if I want to write a quick script in a language and I have to first write a JSON or XML parser, task is already failed.
This was like four years ago, so maybe the ecosystem is better now. Or maybe scripting was the wrong ruler to measure Janet by. I don’t know but this post is making me want to reinstall it.
They put things like JSON and regex in the 'spork' module, which is kinda like libc; theres a strong internal drive to keep the core light. Many projects depend on spork, so it its likely to be installed on early.
The docs are decent, though I agree there are still gaps in practical examples, this has been supplemented by https://janetdocs.com, which are linked as "community examples" per function
Readit News
It doesn't work in my browser - which is understandable because my computer is ancient - but sometimes when I want a break from study in the library I'll spend thirty minutes on a library computer playing in bauble there. I might get around to trying to figure out how the thing works, but the graphics you can make just fiddling with numbers is wild.
Long life to Janet.
One thing I like about Guile is how much effort they've put into describing compatibility with the RNRS standards. Not sure how Schemey Janet actually is, but I'm curious to find out.
The language. https://janet-lang.org/
https://everybody.codes
:( The turtles were real, not metaphorical: http://classicacorn.computinghistory.org.uk/8bit_focus/logo/...
(it fits the definition of metaphor 'One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol' but it has the feel of people saying "my niece thought the floppy disk save icon is a refrigerator because that's where you save leftover food" not realising that it was a real piece of fun/cute hardware many moons ago).
Janet is my first exposure to PEGs, so nothing to compare against but I love how powerful and easy they are. I have a better grasp of them in only a few months than dabbling over 20yrs with regex.
Also there is quite a bit of The Good Place callbacks within the Janet community; numerous 3rd party modules are named after characters, for example.
btw, I like the namesake, but a language named Janet is pretty much obligated to also prioritize control.
This was like four years ago, so maybe the ecosystem is better now. Or maybe scripting was the wrong ruler to measure Janet by. I don’t know but this post is making me want to reinstall it.
The docs are decent, though I agree there are still gaps in practical examples, this has been supplemented by https://janetdocs.com, which are linked as "community examples" per function