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The Hidden Gem of Lua Programming
Fennel: A Lisp Dialect You Need to Try
In the past few days, I’ve been playing with a fascinating little language called Fennel, which runs on top of Lua. Here’s what I learned along the way.
Fennel is a hosted language that compiles (“transpiles”) to Lua and offers all the powerful features associated with Lisps, such as macros and homoiconicity.
Fennel can be used anywhere Lua runs, such as game development, microcontrollers or to write extensions for various applications, like web servers and browsers.
Why Fennel Is Worth Taking a Look?
If you’re a language designer looking to build a website to feature your programming language, look at fennel-lang.org, because this is how you do it.
It’s a simple, minimalistic design with just the right amount of information, beautifully crafted, the same as Fennel itself.
There are zero distractions. You can immediately see the main features of the language, the use cases, and the applications, and there is a web-based REPL where you can try things out.
