[sheepscreek]

Really clean language where the design decisions have led to fewer traps (cond is a good choice).

It’s peculiar to see s-expressions mixed together with imperative style. I’ve been experimenting along similar lines - mixing s-expressions with ML style in the same dialect (for a project).

Having an agentic partner toiling away with the lexer/parser/implementation details is truly liberating. It frees the human to explore crazy ideas that would not have been feasible for a side/toy/hobby project earlier.

[catlifeonmars]

I had the same reaction to seeing S-expressions, but my conclusion was that this should just be a lisp. Why stop just at operators?

[jkh99]

I posted about this also on linkedIn. I actually tried to do a bunch of agentic coding in Clojure but found that the parser really got in my way - it continuously fooled the LLM on what line number the errors actually occurred on!

This is why I made nanolang always report line numbers accurately and also have a built-in "trace mode" where, with an environment variable set, it would tell you exactly what line number was producing which C code and which behaviors were being exhibited (state changes). The LLM uses this aggressively for debugging!

[catlifeonmars]

> it would tell you exactly what line number was producing which C code and which behaviors were being exhibited (state changes)

Would you consider generating sourcemaps? Although they’re mainly used for minified JavaScript they sound like a perfect fit for this use case. Plus they’re so ubiquitous there’s already a ton of tooling that understands them.