Learning Fennel as the first Lisp

[molleweide]

Hi there,

I am excited to try out lightspeed.

I have never used fennel before and I am wondering if you wrote the plugin in one big fennel file? 😃
Personally I have just started out learning haskell which is pretty amazing and I am getting very curious
to learn some fennel as well. Is it hard to learn fennel and how much does knowledge of fennel transfer over to common lisp?
Would it be a good idea to look into fennel or should I learn lisp first?

[ggandor]

Hi! 🦉

...you wrote the plugin in one big fennel file?

Sure :)

Personally I have just started out learning haskell which is pretty amazing

Indeed, keep on going! 😊

Is it hard to learn fennel and how much does knowledge of fennel transfer over to common lisp? Would it be a good idea to look into fennel or should I learn lisp first?

Definitely dive into a more "proper" Lisp first - that can be Racket, Common Lisp, or Clojure (🤍), which latter is the most similar to Fennel on the surface. However, the emphasis is on the "on the surface" part. To be able to use Fennel to its full potential, one has to be well-versed in (modern) Lisps and Lua, since under the hood Fennel is all Lua - it's mostly a syntactic convenience layer. That said, given those two prerequisites it's a breeze to learn it, with only one or two minor gotchas ahead.

[MuhammedZakir]

Don't do that. Take it as a joke. It won't work like you would expect.

About Emacs: I use Evil layer. I heard Doom config is pretty good if you want Vim-like experience in Emacs and it's also a batteries-included config -- comes with most of the stuff that you will need.

[molleweide]

Haha cool yeah i get it but it sounds funny. I use doom-nvim instead so that I can get help with configs and stuff since I am quite new to vim.

[MuhammedZakir]

I didn't know about doom-nvim. Thanks for that! :-) FYI, there is another nice config named LunarVim.

[molleweide]

Yeah i saw lunarnvim also but had already gotten invested in doom nvim. In the end theyre probably very similar but i really like doom nvim

[molleweide]

The maintainers of doom are also the guys developing neorg which is suppose to be like an org equivalent for nvim