krylon

Writing a Lisp interpreter an Lisp is cheating. You get the reader and garbage collector for free.

Don't get me wrong, it's fun. But if you want to learn about things, writing a Lisp interpreter in some (relatively speaking) low-level language like C/C++ is a much more satisfying experience. And then write a Lisp interpreter to run on your Lisp.

Bonus points if you get to optimize tail recursion. (I didn't, but I didn't try to, so I don't consider it a failure.)

capableweb
Writing a Lisp interpreter in C/C++ is cheating. You get readable code and a standard library for free. Don't get me wrong, it's surely fun, but if you really wanna learn about things, you need to write a Lisp interpreter in Assembly. It's a much more satisfying experience.

Jokes aside, I'm hoping the author continues to feel free to spend their time implementing whatever idea they come across that is interesting. Sure, it's not as advanced as implementing something in C/C++, but maybe the authors goal was just to understand their preferred lisp (Clojure) better, rather than trying to understand C/C++ better?

> Bonus points if you get to optimize tail recursion. (I didn't, but I didn't try to, so I don't consider it a failure.)

Is this as complicated as people put it? I've never implemented my own lisp, but MAL (https://github.com/kanaka/mal) makes it seem like a relatively easy step in the process.