In the last few days, I have gotten the question ‘What are the differences between LFE and Joxa?’ quiet a few times. So instead of answering them individually I thought I would write up the differences here.

Goals

The primary and most important difference is in the Goals of the two languages. I believe that the primary goal Robert had in mind when implementing LFE was to provide a mutable and syntax extensible version of Erlang. This would allow people to change the language where they needed to. Also, I suspect, very strongly, that Robert likes implementing languages and he had a lot of fun implementing LFE. I certainly did with Joxa. However, I had some other very specific goals when I sat down to create Joxa.

  1. I needed a platform for the development of Domain Specific Languages.
  2. I wanted a more iterative and dynamic development environment. Something on the order of Slime and Swank.
  3. I wanted to leverage all of the rather excellent Lisp tools that are out there.

Each of these things could have been solved in Erlang. For example, I could have implemented each language using Leex and Yecc. However, my best experience with DSLs has always come from Lisp and building those DSLs via functions and macros in Lisp itself. However, I have been using Erlang for a long time, and I was very unwilling to give up the features of the Erlang VM to get those advantages from Lisp. The only solution seemed to be using a Lisp on the Erlang VM.

The obvious first choice was LFE. So I spent several weeks digging into the language and its internals. In the end, I decided it did not suit my purposes, and the only fallback was to create a language of my own (there was a bit of sanity questioning involved as well).

With that in mind, lets enumerate some of the major differences.

Lisp 1 vs. Lisp 2

Simply put, LFE is a Lisp 2 while Joxa is a Lisp 1. According to Richard P. Gabriel, the lisp one vs. Lisp 2 is defined as follows:

> Lisp-1 has a single namespace that serves a dual role as the > function namespace and value namespace; that is, its function > namespace and value namespace are not distinct. In Lisp-1, the > functional position of a form and the argument positions of forms > are evaluated according to the same rules. > > Lisp-2 has distinct function and value namespaces. In Lisp-2, the > rules for evaluation in the functional position of a form are > distinct from those for evaluation in the argument positions of the > form. Common Lisp is a Lisp-2 dialect.

To give a practical example of the above description lets say that you have a function called hello-world that returns an atom hello-world. To define and call that function in Joxa you would do:

(defn hello-world ()
    :hello-world)

(hello-world)

To do the same thing in LFE you would do the following:

(defun hello-world ()
   'hello-world)

(: hello-world)

Note: In LFE the : serves the same purpose as funcall in Common Lisp.

The Lisp world has been arguing about which is better since the dawn of the universe. It very much depends on personal preference. For me, I find Lisp 2 to be very unnatural and counter-intuitive nearly to the point where I won’t code in it.

Erlang Syntax vs. Lisp Syntax

LFE is, as its name implies, is a Lisp version of the Erlang Language and whose intention is to provide a Lisp very close to Erlang and it’s Semantics.

Joxa has no such intention. It is a unique language that happens to be targeted at the Erlang VM. It makes no effort to provide Erlang, Common Lisp semantics. The entire goal is to provide a tight, small well understood functional language with a clean, approachable syntax that allows for the use of Lisp style macros.

As you will notice in using Joxa, there is very little in the way of Erlang syntax and even less of Common Lisp. Some syntax for declarative data structures has been pulled over but very little more. Most of the syntax comes from Clojure and Scheme.

Evaluated Macros vs. In System Macros

In LFE macros are evaluated in LFE itself and not with the Erlang VM. This means that macro evaluation has different semantics then function evaluation. In LFE macros are not simply functions that run at compile time like they are lisp. The are special things that have their evaluation semantics different from those of normal functions. So not only must you keep in mind the normal compile time vs. runtime semantics you must also keep in mind the function vs. macro semantics. I believe this is a hindrance to the easy use of macros.

For that reason, Joxa takes an incremental approach to module compilation that allows macros to be evaluated on the VM in the exact same way as functions and there is no need at all to worry about differences in the evaluation environment between normal functions and macros. Since one of the important goals of Joxa is explicitly supporting DSLs this unified evaluation environment for functions and macros is quite important.

Language Bootstrapping

I am the co-founder of a startup called Afiniate, and we are basing important aspects of Afiniate’s business on Joxa. It is very important to us that Joxa be both well tested and stable. To that end, the language has been bootstrapped on itself. That is, Joxa is implemented in Joxa. This allowed us to test the system and work out many problems very early on. This also serves as an important litmus test for new features and changes. This litmus test caches many types of problems before they ever leave the developers desktop. I believe that this bootstrapping is a fundamental requirement for any language that will be used in production systems.

Joxa is also extremely well tested. As I said, we are basing an important part of our business on this platform and we must ensure, as much as possible, that we can iterate on the platform quickly while retaining its stability. ⤧  Next post Exploring A New Development Interface ⤧  Previous post How To Manage Erlang/OTP Releases