dustycloud/posts/wisp-lisp-alternative.html

title: Wisp: Lisp, minus the parentheses
date: 2015-09-23 17:05
author: Christine Lemmer-Webber
tags: wisp, scheme, lisp, hacking, foss
slug: wisp-lisp-alternative
---
<p>
<a href="http://draketo.de/">Arne Babenhauserheide</a>
has built a really cool syntax alternative for Scheme,
<a href="http://draketo.de/english/wisp">Wisp</a>
(not to be confused with a
<a href="https://github.com/Gozala/wisp">different lisp-related-wisp</a>),
or in standards version,
<a href="http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-119/srfi-119.html">SRFI 119</a>.
It looks pretty nice:
</p>

<blockquote>
<pre>
;; hello world example
display                             ;    (display
  string-append "Hello " "World!"   ;      (string-append "Hello " "World!"))
display "Hello Again!"              ;    (display "Hello Again!")

;; hello world function
define : hello who                  ;    (define (hello who)
  display                           ;      (display 
    string-append "Hello " who "!"  ;        (string-append "Hello " who "!")))
</pre>
</blockquote>

<p>
Actually, let's see that in emacs, just to be sure.
</p>

<p class="centered">
  <img src="/etc/images/blog/wisp_emacs_hello.png" alt="Wisp and hello world" />
</p>

<p>
How about something slightly more substantial?  How about a real life
Guix package for GNU Grep:
</p>

<p class="centered">
  <img src="/etc/images/blog/wisp_emacs_guix_grep.png" alt="Wisp, Emacs, Guix and Grep" />
</p>

<p>Wow, not bad... not bad at all!  I'd say that's quite readable!
(Too bad the lines don't line up exactly in that screenshot; that's
not the code but rather my emacs theme bolding the wisp code.)</p>

<p>
What's nice is that unlike most s-expression alternatives, it doesn't
lack any of the power of Lisp; it's "just lisp" with the parentheses
hidden by vaguely pythonesque indentation, which means even macros
work.
</p>

<p>
Now me personally? I've learned to love the parens, and there's
nothing that beats an editor that knows how to do cool structural
s-expression editing and navigation. But I admit that learning to read
through all the parentheses was a tough thing for me initally, and
certainly for many others. Maybe this can help boil the lisp frog for
some.
</p>

<p>
Now what would <em>really</em> be hylarious would be to port this to
<a href="http://hylang.org/">Hy</a>...
</p>