1 month review of Lisp

Somehow, in the span of a single month, I already got tired of most Lisp variants. But among all the trash (and not so trash), I managed to find one that would fit my needs: a standalone, simple, portable language.

Here’s a summary of my experiences: Common Lisp is bloat, Clojure is perfect (except for the JVM), Scheme is too focused on embedding and small programs and Fennel is almost perfect, but it depends on Lua. At the end of the day, Janet takes the good of Clojure and Fennel and focuses on creating minimal yet functional programs.

This 2026 I’m planning on staying almost-exclusively in Janet given that I have a tendency of switching tools.

December 24, 2025 -- Niliaranet