I've read the book and I found it very fascinating and kind of playful, which actually makes learning the Janet program language much more fun. However, I found the documentation of the language lacking in many ways. Oftentimes there are functions or commands that are just there, but there's no example or explanation. or explanation as to what they do. In fact, there are a lot of those that I found in the book, but I couldn't find in the documentation. So this is one of the reasons I stopped learning Janet, even though I really like the idea of this language, and the fact that it has many sane defaults and similarities to mainstream languages instead of like adhering to archaic Lisp conventions. At the end of the day, it's not actually a LISP because it's not cons lists. And it is fine by me, but again, I found the language not fully documented.
Do you remember any of the functions/commands that were not documented? I'm semi active in the Janet community and would be able to work on improving the docs where its lacking!
I had exactly the same experience (minus reading the book). Often, I'd just see the function signature and no further explanation. I do realise that it takes a lot of time and effort to build up extensive docs, but it happened enough that I put it down and started looking for another Lisp that compiles down to a binary.
I'm curious, which Lisp did you end up choosing?
I'm still looking around, but Owl is a frontrunner.
If the bigger runtime isn't a deal breaker, maybe look at Racket.