I couldn’t get into Janet, I’m not sure if this is a personal failing on my part. The only other Lisp I’ve spent any significant time in is Emacs Lisp, and everything in Janet seemed similar enough to that but just subtly different that I was always making silly mistakes. The PEG features were really compelling on paper but I found the syntax unwieldy and confusing. The documentation was complete in that it had descriptions of all the functions, but spartan in that it lacked examples or other helpful usage information. There didn’t seem to be any basic batteries included such as JSON parsing; if I want to write a quick script in a language and I have to first write a JSON or XML parser, task is already failed.

This was like four years ago, so maybe the ecosystem is better now. Or maybe scripting was the wrong ruler to measure Janet by. I don’t know but this post is making me want to reinstall it.