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October 2019

Joker: a Clojure Linter and Interpreter 150 150 craig

Joker: a Clojure Linter and Interpreter

In last November’s post, I discussed what was then called gostd2joker, and have since renamed gostd, which is a fork of Joker. Joker itself is a small, single-threaded linter and interpreter of a subset of Clojure. My fork seeks to automate creation of wrappers around much (if not all) of the Go standard library, and perhaps other arbitrary packages in the future, so they are accessible (even if via fairly primitive, low-level mechanisms that aren’t idiomatic Clojure) via running Joker code.

Though I put that project aside for several months earlier this year, while pursuing other fields of endeavor, I returned to it a few months ago and have made substantial progress. Compare the namespaces provided by canonical Joker to those provided (though incompletely, in most cases) by my fork.

Besides that work, the canonical version of Joker continues to improve at a reasonable pace, and is increasingly useful as a scripting language.

In a recent podcast, Joker’s author, Roman Bataev, discusses Joker’s history, capabilities, and potential futures, including a brief shout-out to my fork at around the 15:00 mark:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s2-e9-joker-with-roman-bataev/id1461500416?i=1000455478703

I continue to enjoy working on this (currently unfunded) project, due to its heady mix of Clojure (a well-designed Lisp variant), Go (a well-designed imperative language), and automated code generation.