Click is a general-purpose functional programming language that aim to be a combination of powerful features from Racket, Clojure and Common Lisp. Click is will aim to target LLVM and WASM for use natively and on the web.
Racket is a solid base language. It’s got the elegant and simple syntax of Scheme, with some powerful additions like it’s looping and comprehensions mechanisms. It’s also got state-of-the-art macros that pieces of will be incorporated into Click. In addition, Racket has pattern matching and the contract system that are very powerful.
While Racket provides a very solid base for the language, Clojure has some must-have features as well. Clojure’s lazy immutable data structures, it’s protocol system, it’s solution to multi-threading, as well as some simple nicities like concise lambda syntax and a simple way to declare functions that take a variable number of arguments.
Common Lisp has Sly and SLIME, the most powerful REPL available for interactive development. Click aims to provide the same type of interactive experience that you get with Sly and SLIME, without forcing you into Emacs. Having that streamlined REPL experience should be available from anything with a terminal.
Click will aim to incorporate several key features from these 3 different programming languages to create a new language that is:
- Simple and elegant
- Provides a lot of solid data structures
- A powerful macro system
- Interactive development
Just some simple example toy programs
(let main []
(println "Hello world!"))(let fib
[((or 0 1)) 1]
[(n) (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))])(let contains?
[(() _) false]
[((x) el) (== x el)]
[((x : xs) el) (or (== x el) (contains? xs el))])(let filter
[(() _) '()]
[((x : xs) cb)
(if (cb x)
(cons x (filter xs cb))
(filter xs cb))])
(filter '(1 2 3 4 5) odd?)
(filter '(1 2 3 4 5) #(> %0 3))
(filter '(1 2 3 4 5) (fn [n] (> n 3)))