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(7 edits)

I want to address an elephant in the room, just to provide an acknowledgement that this project is, well, a Lisp only on the surface. Underneath, it's JavaScript, and it's not always obvious where JavaScript ends and Lisp begins.

Could you say the same thing about Clojure? Elana Hashman calls Clojure her "favorite Java program". In my defense, Python is in C. Does that mean you're programming in C?

But no... it's kind of more than that. The entire audio engine is in JavaScript. And the Lisp is implemented as a poorly optimized tree-walk interpreter made for educational purposes, so sometimes things are painfully slow, and... well fine! Just compile it to JavaScript code and run it from there! I spend a certain amount of time wondering if it's cheating.

I wouldn't expect anyone to say, "Wait a minute... this isn't really a Lisp, you phony! It's an interpreter running in JavaScript! Faker!". But I just figure I should be transparent about what this really is. At times I admittedly wonder if I'm just writing JavaScript via a Lisp front end.

Is there really a difference? It could simply be a result of the fact that I'm developing the language at the same time as the game, which is rather unusual but gives a certain advantage. Perhaps I'm just inviting you to ponder, because it's a unique stack of technology that hasn't really been used before.