Why Fennel?

Why Fennel? Fennel is a programming language that runs on the Lua runtime. Why Lua? The Lua programming language is an excellent and very underrated tool. Is it remarkably powerful yet keeps a very small footprint both conceptually as a language and in terms of the size of its implementation. (The reference implementation consists of about nineteen thousand lines of C and compiles to 278kb.) Partly because it is so simple, Lua is also extremely fast. But the most important thing about Lua is that it's specifically designed to be put in other programs to make them reprogrammable by the end user. The conceptual simplicity of Lua stands in stark contrast to other "easy to learn" languages like JavaScript or Python--Lua contains very close to the minimum number of ideas needed to get the job done; only Forth and Scheme offer a comparable simplicity. When you combine this meticulous simplicity with the emphasis on making programs reprogrammable, the result is a powerful antidote to prev ... Read full article.