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Show HN: Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser

(turtleware.eu)
110 points jackdaniel | 4 comments | 21 Aug 25 12:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.824s | source
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adamddev1 ◴[21 Aug 25 13:43 UTC] No.44972696[source]▶
Ah, in an alternate world where Brendan Eich wasn't pressured by his superiors to make JS more Java-like, we could have had something like this as very normal.

I wonder how much faster that would have pushed the world into FP ideas. While sometimes I prefer the bracket/C syntax, I wonder how things would have evolved if JS was a lisp originally. Instead of things moving to TypeScript, would they be moving to something like typed Lisp or OCaml, or PureScript ?

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umanwizard ◴[21 Aug 25 15:05 UTC] No.44973702[source]▶
Is CL really particularly more “functional” than JavaScript? I don’t know CL but I know it bears some passing similarity to Emacs Lisp, which is usually written in a pretty imperative style. Sure, it has first-class closures but so does JS.
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1. iLemming ◴[21 Aug 25 17:46 UTC] No.44975807[source]▶
Both CL and Elisp are arguably more functional than Javascript in several key ways - Immutable data by convention, First-class function from the start (js added this later), powerful higher-order function are more idiomatic, lexical closures, FP culture that goes back decades. JS has caught up in some aspects - arrow functions, array methods, const, libs like Rambda.

I think, Lisp in general is very flexible - you can write imperatively, or you can do more FP; if you need object-orientation - you have it, polymorphic dispatch - sure why not?, etc., etc.

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2. xigoi ◴[22 Aug 25 11:59 UTC] No.44983454[source]▶
I object to the claim that a Lisp-2 has first-class functions.
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3. iLemming ◴[24 Aug 25 03:22 UTC] No.45001058[source]▶
What? Functions can be passed as arguments? Check! Returned from functions? Check! Stored in variables? Check! Lisp-2 just means functions and vars live in separate namespaces, that's all. In every other aspect they are first-class.
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4. xigoi ◴[24 Aug 25 09:15 UTC] No.45002704{3}[source]▶
The separate namespaces mean that functions are considered as something fundamentally different from other values.