Oh hey! Nice to see this on the front page here. I love Janet -- I've been using it for about year and a half, and it's now my go-to scripting language when I need something more powerful than bash, or when I want to hack on goofy little side project (some examples in my profile).

Parsing expression grammars (think, like, declarative parser combinators?) are a really great feature for ad-hoc text parsing -- and nicer than regular expressions, in my opinion, for anything longer than about ten characters.

The language itself is also a great introductory language-with-lots-of-parentheses, so you can explore compile-time metaprogramming with familiar runtime semantics -- think JavaScript plus value types minus all the wats. The embeddability and easy distribution (compiles to a static binary on any platform) is a huge plus as well.

Honestly I like Janet so much that I'm writing a book about it, because I think it's a shame that the language isn't more well-known. It's great! You should check it out right now!

mike_hock

I went there, saw the Lisp syntax, and noped back out.

sergiotapia

Same reaction here... wow that is a rough looking language. Then again I always disliked those kinds of languages like Clojure. The syntax is just too much for me. I feel like if I used it, it would atrophy my skills in other more traditional languages.

nnadams

I've been using Lisp for hobby projects for a few years. Yes the syntax takes some time, but

> I feel like if I used it, it would atrophy my skills in other more traditional languages.

was not the case for me at all. If you go into a text editor and remove all the parentheses, I find that's how Lisp programmers tend to see Lisp, (function argument) isn't that far from function(argument).

Learning Lisp has only improved my skills as a programmer, after getting ideas like code as data, macros, let over lambda, CLOS and the metaobject protocol. It's a simple model that to me shows how other languages have picked an abstraction and stuck with it, but Lisp has all the tools to implement those abstractions and more.

More mainstream languages are great at focusing the developer, and that makes them very practical. It is amusing though to watch many of the "new features" in languages come out even though Lisp had them years ago.

asyd

Reading Peter Norvig's PAIP (https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp) in 1998 totally blew my mind. It completely changed how I think about programming in every other language I use(d). I love it still, and always will. And yes, my experience is the same as yours: learning lisp made me a better programmer in every other language I use (especially -- but not only -- Python).

The simplicity and symmetry of the syntax is a big part of that love for me. Being able to manipulate lisp code as lisp data, using the full power of the language to do so, is just brilliant.

Janet looks lovely! Looking forward to the book.