Owl Lisp – A functional Scheme for world domination
41 points by Lyngbakr 11 hours ago | 3 comments
  • ianbicking 8 hours ago |
    The repo doesn't say much... I thought maybe the docs would justify "world domination" in some fashion, but they are rather dry: https://haltp.org/posts/owl.html

    Is there something that describes what is notable about this Lisp dialect?

    • vincent-manis 4 hours ago |
      I haven't looked at it, but it's purely functional (so no destructive operations such as set!). It can't be called Scheme, because it's a subset of RnRS Scheme; that's why Racket isn't called PLT-Scheme any more. I can imagine this as a teaching tool (though the FAQ says the error messages aren't good), or perhaps usable as an extension language.

      I'm going to look at it as a scripting tool that compiles to C.

      I used to work for a company whose internal communication often claimed “world domination” as its ultimate goal. I just looked at revenue estimates for its market sector, this company isn't in the top 5, and is far behind the leader. Let's just leave Owl's world domination goal as aspirational.

  • foundry27 7 hours ago |
    The big-picture view is here: https://gitlab.com/owl-lisp/owl/-/blob/master/doc/manual.md

    Key points include:

    - 100% immutable datastructures

    - Immutability is leveraged to make a lot of core operations concurrent

    - Continuation-based threading model and Actor-based concurrency

    - Fun little VM implemented behind the scenes

    That being said, the documentation strongly contradicts the title!

    > The goal has not at any point been to become an ultimate Lisp and take over the world