Please link to https://book.jank-lang.org/ for anything related to the jank alpha. I wasn't quite ready to announce the alpha, but I appreciate that folks are excited. :)
There's just a couple more compiler features I wanted to get merged, but everything should be in order for folks to follow the book and try jank out.
Hi! I'm excited about jank and so I'm excitedly reading through the book you just linked. I noticed some grammatical errors. Will you consider PRs to the `book` section of the code, or would you prefer feedback in some other format in order to better maintain your authorial voice?
Hi! I'm happy to accept grammatical PRs to the book. You could also report issues via Slack or Github issue. I will not be accepting larger PRs to the book, to maintain a consistent voice.
Do you envision the development to track clojure as much as is possible, similar to how cljs was conceived to be clojure in js and not just clojure-ish js, or do you think you'll eventually diverge? I made a language a while ago that was like 90% clojure but hesitated to call it that because I didn't want there to be an expectation that the same code would run as-is in both languages. Seems like from the landing page you're going for more of a drop in replacement. Look cool, good luck!
Congrats on the alpha release! I've been following the jank blog for a year now and it's great to see it reach this milestone. What is the current state of development tooling (such as CIDER support) for Emacs users?
As a dialect of Clojure, it's a dynamically typed language. But its designer has expressed interest in eventually adding static type checks via a gradual typing system¹:
> I mentioned that a native Clojure is the first step toward my dream language. Indeed, it doesn't stop there. jank will always be a Clojure dialect, but it will also optionally support more. Features like gradual typing (maybe linear typing), more explicit memory management, value-based errors, and stronger pattern matching, to name a few, improve upon Clojure. This will allow another axis of control, where some parts of the program can remain entirely dynamic and garbage collected while others are thoroughly controlled and better optimized. That’s exactly the control I want when programming.
Carp is great and I would love to include a mode of jank which is very much Carp-esque. If you're interested in working together on this, please let me know.
No full-lang static type system. jank has seamless C++ interop and all interop is statically typed, but as soon as things get back into Clojure land, it's all dynamically typed and hella polymorphic.
I will be exploring optional static typing modes for jank in the future, a la Carp. That will not be this year, though.
Please link to https://book.jank-lang.org/ for anything related to the jank alpha. I wasn't quite ready to announce the alpha, but I appreciate that folks are excited. :)
There's just a couple more compiler features I wanted to get merged, but everything should be in order for folks to follow the book and try jank out.
Hi! I'm excited about jank and so I'm excitedly reading through the book you just linked. I noticed some grammatical errors. Will you consider PRs to the `book` section of the code, or would you prefer feedback in some other format in order to better maintain your authorial voice?
Hi! I'm happy to accept grammatical PRs to the book. You could also report issues via Slack or Github issue. I will not be accepting larger PRs to the book, to maintain a consistent voice.
Cool! I'm still reading, but when I'm done I'll open a PR for the few small issues I've seen.
Thanks for your work on jank! I hope the Alpha brings you lots of new users, useful bug reports, and some contributors. :)
big kudos to all involved
Do you envision the development to track clojure as much as is possible, similar to how cljs was conceived to be clojure in js and not just clojure-ish js, or do you think you'll eventually diverge? I made a language a while ago that was like 90% clojure but hesitated to call it that because I didn't want there to be an expectation that the same code would run as-is in both languages. Seems like from the landing page you're going for more of a drop in replacement. Look cool, good luck!
Congrats on the alpha release! I've been following the jank blog for a year now and it's great to see it reach this milestone. What is the current state of development tooling (such as CIDER support) for Emacs users?
Also I noticed a typo/broken link in the Welcome section: The link for "foreward" points to https://book.jank-lang.org/foreward.html, but it should be https://book.jank-lang.org/foreword.html
We have a working nREPL server, but it's not yet merged into the jank repo. https://github.com/kylc/try-jank
There's a Clang bug getting in the way of the progress we want, so we'll need to work around. There's a lot I'm juggling, but this is high priority.
Thanks for the broken link report. That should be fixed now.
Accompanying book: https://book.jank-lang.org/
Is there a static type system included/inferred?
Couldn’t not find the answer
As a dialect of Clojure, it's a dynamically typed language. But its designer has expressed interest in eventually adding static type checks via a gradual typing system¹:
> I mentioned that a native Clojure is the first step toward my dream language. Indeed, it doesn't stop there. jank will always be a Clojure dialect, but it will also optionally support more. Features like gradual typing (maybe linear typing), more explicit memory management, value-based errors, and stronger pattern matching, to name a few, improve upon Clojure. This will allow another axis of control, where some parts of the program can remain entirely dynamic and garbage collected while others are thoroughly controlled and better optimized. That’s exactly the control I want when programming.
--
1: https://jank-lang.org/blog/2025-01-10-i-quit-my-job/
Oh man, as someone who used to contribute to a statically typed lispy language this would be the dream for me.
there's always carp lang but no gc
That's the language I was talking about :)
But none of us have worked on it in a while.
Carp is great and I would love to include a mode of jank which is very much Carp-esque. If you're interested in working together on this, please let me know.
It's too bad. I was looking at it the other day, looks really interesting.
No full-lang static type system. jank has seamless C++ interop and all interop is statically typed, but as soon as things get back into Clojure land, it's all dynamically typed and hella polymorphic.
I will be exploring optional static typing modes for jank in the future, a la Carp. That will not be this year, though.
It is implementing Clojure which does not have static typing so my strong assumption would be no
Clojure offers static typing as a library.
Is that 'core.typed' ?
Does it introduce incompatibilities with third-party libraries?
typed Clojure has both Clojure and ClojureScript implementations, so it's not tied to the JVM https://github.com/typedclojure/typedclojure
For a second, I misread and thought it was going to be about this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Lang_(French_politician)
I thought someone named Jank Lang found investment alpha.