

Praising Kernel (The Axis of Eval) - Autre
http://axisofeval.blogspot.com/2011/08/praising-kernel.html

======
pnathan
Kernel the language can be found here:
<http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html>

Where the author mentions that it is related to his doctoral dissertation,
_Fexprs as the basis of Lisp function application; or, $vau: the ultimate
abstraction_ [1].

[1] <http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-090110-124904/>

------
AndresNavarro
I think I'll use this opportunity for a shameless plug:
<https://bitbucket.org/AndresNavarro/klisp>

This is my ongoing project for a Kernel interpreter. It's already functional
and it even has documentation. It is still, however, a work in progress!

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Autre
Also: have a look at <https://github.com/manuel/schampignon> (an interpreter
for a Kernel-like language)

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nickik
I generally agree with alot the autor said and I will surly check out kernel.

About JITs \----------------

I agree that Scheme missed the JIT thing. Most Scheme compiler are AOT but
Scheme would be nice to do research in JITs for dynamic languages. Now we have
it in JS witch is more complicated. It would be nice if there would be a fast
and small JIT for Scheme that is good for learning. is there something like
that? I know Racket has something like that but Racket is much more then just
a JIT for Scheme.

About Clojure \----------------

I think the author missunderstands Clojure (not just in this article). The
"see the need (... of eval)"-statment was not about eval in general. Clojure
has eval. The statmand was about having eval in ClojureScript (Clojure that
AOT Compiles to JS) and there is not a priorety because its need is much less
then the usfullness.

Clojure wants to be practical now and not be revolutionary. It never said it
want to be ideal it just makes the best of what we have.

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tsewlliw
I've read about Kernel before, but this time I wondered if $vau is in any way
related to 0 from Jot (the turing tarpit best apparently best used as a Goedel
numbering).

Maybe I should just write jshutt...

~~~
pwpwp
there are certain similarities to other very-low-operator-count languages -
the big difference is that with Kernel's fexprs, you can go from this handful
of operators to a fully-featured language more expressive than Scheme, and do
so with style. See the R-1RK - it builds up the whole language, sequentially,
from the built-ins:

ftp://ftp.cs.wpi.edu/pub/techreports/pdf/05-07.pdf

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bgurupra
Unrelated to the content of the article but by the UI - is it just me or does
have pitch black background with white text is a bad design for the eye?

~~~
lisper
It's not just you. White text on a black background is HORRIBLE design. That's
why my Readability bookmarklet sees a lot of use.

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copper
Not that it makes a difference, but I believe R6RS provide first-class
environments, too: <http://www.r6rs.org/final/html/r6rs-lib/r6rs-lib-
Z-H-17.html>

Edit: After looking through the Racket docs, I believe I was referring to were
its namespaces.

