Unfortunately, given the clear LLM basis of this project, s-expressions aren't a great choice. I've found coding agents struggle really hard with s-expression parentheses matching.
Much better to give them something more M-expr styled, I think a grammar that is LL(1) is probably helpful in that regard.
Basically the more you can piggyback on the training data depth for algol-style and pythonic languages the better.
If you already have the ability to express the grammar productions in Rust that allow for optionally-specified types (e.g. variable declaration), then you have the ability to express lifetimes and the turbofish (which is just a curious way to call a generic function with a specific type parameter). The only weird thing would be that Lisp uses the apostrophe character for something very different than Rust, but you could just pick any other way to denote lifetimes.
How do you change the syntax to eliminate reverse compatibility? I guess you could change the names of most key functions between releases. But to be compatible with rust you would need to make breaking changes every release.
I think some comments are missing the upside of it being precisely Rust, without any new semantics. If you want lisp that compiles to machine code, Common Lisp can get reasonably efficient. The purpose of bringing Rust into it is to surface Rust-specific semantics -- which many people quite like!
It seems like this is more like writing Rust in an s-expression syntax instead of having a proper lisp dialect that compiles to Rust, which is cool I guess but not very interesting.
It's quite weird-looking for someone who's done any amount of lisp programming.
Yeah, it sort of reminds me of the microcode assembly of a few of the lisp machines, that, while in s-expressions were also clearly not lisp themselves. But could be an interesting target for some lisp macros.
A let that defines variables that have a lifetime beyond the scope of the expression? Yeah, that's really unusual. And it's not even the oddest looking thing from the first example block of code.
Yes, but you could do the same by transforming Rust's ASTs. The only downside is that your input format is different from the format you are transforming. But the upside is that readability is much improved, which matters because code is typically read far more often than it is written.
Scheme already has hygenic macros, I don't get why you'd vibecode a worse (less battle tested, llm-generated) replacement. I'm not sure why this hit the front-page, to be honest, because it doesn't seem noteworthy or interesting (Anyone and their mother can vibecode something like this in eight hours)
Much better to give them something more M-expr styled, I think a grammar that is LL(1) is probably helpful in that regard.
Basically the more you can piggyback on the training data depth for algol-style and pythonic languages the better.
> Everything Rust has … expressed as s-expressions. No semantic gap.
It's quite weird-looking for someone who's done any amount of lisp programming.
The first paragraph says literally that.
It reads as No X no Y just slop to me every time.