from Hacker News

Lisp Flavoured Erlang 1.0 released after 8 years of development

by vdaniuk on 3/17/16, 2:04 AM with 91 comments

• by eggy on 3/17/16, 4:40 AM

  Great news! I wanted to learn BEAM/OTP, but had tried Erlang briefly years ago, and then went back to Common Lisp. Now I can try to learn BEAM/OTP in a syntax that is more appealing to me than Elixir's Ruby-like syntax. I like Elixir, and it is very popular, but true runtime macros are available in LFE 1.0. In addition, Robert Virding was one of the co-creators of Erlang, so his devotion to bringing the best Lisp he could to the BEAM platform within its confines, comes with some authority. The Google Group Lisp Flavoured Erlang is a very responsive community and resource for getting started. Congratulations LFE on your v1.0! OT, but I also use Extempore - the music, graphics livecoding environment with a great language, xtlang that I believe was based upon S7 scheme and has an LLVM backend [1]. There are some s-expression to WebAssembly projects floating around too. All around good news for all the choices to work with up front no matter your preferences.

     [1]  http://extempore.moso.com.au/

• by vdaniuk on 3/17/16, 2:07 AM

  Robert Virding has just announced the release on twitter https://twitter.com/rvirding/status/710259707819249664

  I feel that this LFE release further validates BEAM as a promising platform for future development of new programming languages. Also I look forward to reading SICP converted to LFE. Available chapters can be found here https://www.gitbook.com/book/lfe/sicp

• by akavel on 3/17/16, 9:10 AM

  I've stumbled into an interesting related comment on twitter, didn't know:

  "#Erlang based language ecosystem is more diverse than many know: #efene #reia #lfe #luaerl #erlog #elixir #mercury"

  https://twitter.com/BillBarnhill/status/670601359016771584

  edit: Wow, and many of them seem to actually be by the same rvirding who authored lfe:

  https://github.com/rvirding/luerl

  https://github.com/rvirding/erlog

• by rvirding on 3/17/16, 5:30 PM

  I do want to point out that LFE has been release ready and of production quality for a long time but I tend to suffer from a "Jag ska bara"* syndrome which has delayed things. :-)

  * I am just going to ...

• by Kuytu on 3/17/16, 7:30 AM

  Robert Virding gave a short talk on LFE at ClojuTRE last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvCBTpnlqs8

• by jb1991 on 3/17/16, 8:31 AM

  Virding's YouTube presentation at a Clojure conference about this new lisp says this in the caption:

  >LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang) has been designed to run efficiently on the Erlang VM and at the same time be a "real lisp" providing Lisp's good bits.

  It also knocks Clojure a bit. What do you all think are the "good bits" of lisp that Clojure lacks?

• by jarpineh on 3/17/16, 2:55 PM

  This looks really interesting. I installed it easily through Brew. REPL seems to work fast.

  Now if my Clojure flawored Lisp starter level knowledge could be somehow transformed into Erlang flawor...

  I wrote this:

      > (map (lists:seq 1 10) (lambda (a) (io:format a)))
  

  and this happened:

      #M((1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10) #Fun<lfe_eval.12.88887576>)
  

  So, I'm not quite there yet. Hopefully somebody can make a Clojure to LFE comparison.

  And using Elixir based things like Phoenix springs to mind...

• by namelezz on 3/17/16, 4:38 AM

  > A proper Lisp-2, based on the features and limitations of the Erlang VM

  What are limitations?

• by aidenn0 on 3/17/16, 4:27 PM

  The users manual has a stub section for macros; does anybody know how LFE macros work? It says "lisp style" but that allows at least 4 options (syntax pattern-matching versus classic defmacro, and capturing versus non-capturing).

• by clw8 on 3/17/16, 8:39 AM

  My exposure to the Erlang world is limited to having read the first few chapters of Programming Elixir. Is interop trivial? Can you easily use Erlang, Elixir, and LFE in the same project?

• by im_down_w_otp on 3/17/16, 9:30 PM

  The docs are sadly very incomplete still. :-(

  How do I go about sponsoring a technical writer to complete them?

• by philjackson on 3/17/16, 11:46 AM

  I'd love to see a comparison with Clojure, anyone know of such a thing yet?

• by alberth on 3/17/16, 3:57 PM

  Slightly off topic: does anyone have an update on BEAM JIT?

• by andrewvijay on 3/17/16, 6:36 AM

  Just waiting for the day when someone launches a js version then the whole world is gonna be coding on erlang vm I think.

• by diskcat on 3/17/16, 7:04 AM

  Could you believe that 2016 is the year of the beginning of the LISP renaissance.

  Im going to buy some spare paren keys, they might become scarce in the immediate future.