I love the Janet programming language. Here's some background on what it is, how I found it, and some stuff I've used it for.
What's Janet?
Janet is a super small, dynamically typed, multi-paradigm, Clojure-inspired, modern Lisp implemented in C. The programs you write in Janet can either run as interpreted scripts executed by the Janet executable, or compile to stand-alone native executables that don't need Janet to run. That makes it a great language for system scripting (as an alternative to Bash or other shell scripts), rapid prototyping, or even embedding inside of other C or C++ programs. Even though the language's footprint is extremely small—the entire thing, including core library, interpreter, compiler, assembler, and included modules, is less than 1MB in size!)—it comes out of the box with a number of cool above-and-beyond features, like native support for multi-threaded programs, networking niceties, cross-platform OS interop, and a powerful Regex alternative called PEG (which stands for Parsing Expression Grammar).
Janet is a great fit for my uses—which are, more specifically, basic toy programs, personal hobby projects, and general tinkering just to learn how programming works.
Here's a sample of Janet's syntax:
# Janet Syntax Sample
(+ 1 1) # => 2
(defn fibonacci [n]
(var a 0)
(var b 1)
(var c 0)
(case n
0 0
1 1
(do (for i 0 (dec n)
(set c (+ a b))
(set a b)
(set b c))
b)))
(comment (fibonacci 50)) # => 12586269025
(defn main [&opt args]
(print "Hello, world!"))
How I Found Janet
My first contact with Programming was Python 2.x, which I tried to learn when I was 11. YouTube had not been invented at the time (and even if it had, we didn't have the kind of internet that could make good use of it), and learning to code without any help other than Google was really difficult. My goal was to program video games, and Google told me that using Python together with PyGame was a beginner-friendly way to start (dear reader: it was not that). Ultimately, 11-year-old me was not very successful in his attempts to become a l33t c0de sl1ng3r.
A few decades (oof) later, I stumbled into learning Haskell as an accident of learning about Formal Logic and Lambda Calculus. I really enjoyed programming in Haskell (I still have a little bit of Haskell on my GitHub), and learning Haskell led me to discover Category Theory, which I'm still enthusiastically learning about to this day. But, while Monads and Monoids are great fun to think about and (partially) figure out in the abstract, needing to reason around them to accomplish even the most basic programming tasks (like, oh I don't know, printing a string to the terminal) made Haskell a much sharper knife than I really needed for tinkering around with toy programs and hobby projects.
-- Haskell Syntax Sample
1 + 1 -- => 2
fibonacci :: Int -> Integer
fibonacci n = go n (0, 1)
where
go !n (!a, !b)
| n == 0 = a
| otherwise = go (n - 1) (b, a + b)
fibonacci 50 -- => 12586269025
main :: IO()
main = putStrLn "Hello, World!"
That's when I got into Clojure. Clojure and Haskell are often mentioned in the same breath because they are both emphatically Functional languages, both are considered weird and unorthodox in comparison with most mainstream languages, and both have vocal support from their niche user bases. That said, the differences between them are profound: Haskell is first and foremost a mathematics-inspired language by and for Computer Science academics to explore the far reaches of Programming Language Theory, while Clojure started off as one salty Java programmer's pet project and has blossomed over the years into a stable, no-nonsense tool for world-weary old timers to just get things done.
; Clojure Syntax Sample
(+ 1 1) ; => 2
(defn fibonacci [n]
(loop [fib-nums [0 1]]
(if (> (count fib-nums) n)
(last fib-nums)
(let [[n1 n2] (reverse fib-nums)]
(recur (conj fib-nums (+ n1 n2)))))))
(comment (fibonacci 50)) ; => 12586269025
(defn main [& args]
(print "Hello, world!"))
I loved the minimal syntax, REPL-driven development style, and S-Expression-enabled editing experience of Clojure (all of which owes to Clojure's roots in Lisp). But Clojure is (quite happily) married to the JVM, making its startup times slow and the install size for the language fairly big. Since I just need something simple and fast for side projects and tinkering, the JVM quickly started to feel like serious overkill.
I decided to look for other Lisp variants that might be a little lighter weight. Clojure is a Lisp, so it benefits from a long tradition of Lisps going back to the early 70's. But, far from simply carrying the torch forward of any given Lisp variant, Clojure is a highly opinionated reinterpretation of the Lisp tradition (a la its original creator, Rich Hickey). Since that Hickey-esque reinterpretation was my first introduction to Lisp, more traditional Lisp offerings like Common Lisp, Scheme, and Racket feel weird and foreign to me, with a lot of historical baggage that I don't resonate with. I could probably get used to any of them, but with each one my first impression led me to keep looking in case there was something else out there.
Enter Janet.
Janet: The Best (For Me) of Many Different Worlds
Janet is loosely inspired by Clojure's take on Lisp, but since it's implemented in basic C, it's not tied at the hip to the JVM. It's tiny and lightweight, meaning I can tinker with it everywhere (even on my Android phone). It's more forgiving than Clojure when it comes to mutable data and functional style, though you totally can still program in those styles if you really want to.
The library ecosystem covers a few of the most important basics—things like bindings for SQLite 3 and Postgres, a graphics library, facilities for making http/s requests, some testing libraries, a fairly mature web framework, a static site generator, and some other miscellaneous odds and ends—but many good ideas from other ecosystems are yet to be implemented for Janet. This is exciting, in some ways, because it means there's tons of room to contribute useful things to the Janet community.
As for tooling, the basics exist and are reasonably solid. Janet uses its own build tool and dependency manager called jpm, which I've generally found effective, well-documented, and easy enough to use. The editor situation is, again, pretty basic but functional—more on that in a moment.
My Contributions
So far, I've worked on two big projects in/for Janet: first, improvements to the "official" VS Code extension for Janet, and second a TUI Text Editor purely implemented in Janet called Joule.
vscode-janet
The janet-lang GitHub organization contains vscode-janet and janet.vim, which provide (very) basic editor support for VS Code and vim respectively.
The VS Code extension provides exactly two things: syntax highlighting and the ability to send highlighted code snippets to a Janet REPL running in the integrated terminal. This is super helpful—in fact, it covers the very barebones minimum needed for a REPL-driven development workflow—but coming from the absolutely superb VS Code tooling available for Clojure it left a lot to be desired for me.
So, I forked the vscode-janet repo (which you can see for yourself at CFiggers/vscode-janet) and started patching in features that I knew and loved from Calva. So far, I have patched in Calva's ParEdit-style Structural Editing capabilities and as-you-type auto-formatting. It's a little glitchy (especially wherever Janet and Clojure syntax diverges), but I use it every time I'm hacking on a Janet project and I absolutely love it.
Warning: the process for building the extension from source is really poorly documented in the repository itself right now—to get everything working you have to compile some of the source code (the part written in ClojureScript) using shadow-cljs, then as a whole separate step compile the rest of the project (including the output from the ClojureScript compilation) using tsc (the TypeScript compiler). I'll get that cleaned up at some point. 🤡
Joule Editor
Joule is the most involved programming project I've ever made myself from scratch. It's a TUI Text Editor implemented entirely in Janet. To get started with it, I followed along with this super helpful guide by paigeruten. But as it grew in complexity and I started making independent decisions about what to implement and how, it has taken on a life completely its own. I'm super proud of it, janky little thing as it is, and it actually has a practical use-case for me—on my Android phone, I only have access to TUI editors for the most part, and vim is challenging to use without access to a physical keyboard. So Joule is my go-to for text editing when I'm on my phone.
I plan to write a least a small handful of blog posts about Joule, mostly because it's been such a cool and enjoyable learning experience for me getting it to work even as well as I have.
Conclusion
So, if you've found any part of this interesting, go try out Janet! It has a small but curious and welcoming community, which can be found on Gitter (for some unexplainable reason). Ask questions if you run into issues with anything!