Coalton Playground: Type-Safe Lisp in Your Browser
I wanted to share a side project I’ve been tinkering with for a while and finally got around to shipping: Coalton Playground – basically a web-based REPL for Coalton, which is this interesting statically-typed Lisp dialect.
So What’s Coalton?
If you haven’t heard of it, Coalton is kind of a weird (in a good way) mashup – it takes Haskell’s type system and plants it right in the middle of Common Lisp. You get all the type safety stuff like algebraic data types and pattern matching, but it still plays nice with “regular” Lisp code.
Or, as the official site puts it: “Coalton is an efficient, statically typed functional programming language that supercharges Common Lisp“
Why I Built This
I wanted to play with Coalton but setting up a Lisp environment felt like too much work. You need SBCL, then Quicklisp, then install Coalton… and by that point I’d usually get distracted by something else.
So I figured I’d make a playground where you can mess around with it right in the browser.
Here’s What It Looks Like
Pretty straightforward – you write Coalton code like this:
... continue reading