Clojurians Log v2
introduce-yourself
Hi everyone! I'm https://chemaclass.com/, maintainer of https://phel-lang.org/, a Lisp that compiles to PHP. Phel borrows heavily from Clojure: persistent collections, destructuring, macros, REPL, a lot of the idioms you already know. Huge shout-out to @j.s, who pointed me to this community in the first place. He has been helping on Phel for over a year now, pushing it closer to Clojure's syntax and expressiveness, and lately driving the #clojure-test-suite work that is taking Phel to the next level. Kudos 🙌 Happy to be around and learn from you all 🙇
I don't use PHP much at all anymore, but I just took a look at http://phel-lang.org and wow @clojurians-slack.htsg, you have put so much love into this. The Rosetta Stone bit is such an amazing touch, as is the Phel for PHP developers guide. Thank you so much for this work!
I've been keeping an eye on Phel for years. Thanks for all your work on it. I've not used it much yet but I do a fair amount of PHP day to day.
Yes, that's the goal! I'm looking closely at Clojure's syntax as the reference, with the aim of welcoming the broader Lisp community into Phel while also bridging it with the PHP ecosystem, bringing both together. There will inevitably be some internal differences in how Phel works compared to Clojure, simply because of the roots of the PHP interpreter vs. the JVM. But setting those constraints aside, my aim is for the developer experience to feel the same as Clojure's. And I really like @j.s's idea of making the Clojure compatibility status/expectations explicit somewhere in the project. That would set clear expectations for anyone coming from Clojure. Happy to explore that!
Very cool! Do you think the goal is to become a semi-official Clojure dialect over time?
Thank's @clojurians-slack.htsg for all the heavy lifting developing Phel!
Having been a Clojure fan some time prior, I got hooked on Phel when writing WordPress plugins 1,5 years back with it for an otherwise dull work project.
It used to have little bit of it's own syntax and function names here and there, but nowadays with .cljc and initial clojure-test-suite support it's much closer to Clojure.
There's no official Clojure compatibility goal stated but maybe there could be some statement about project's Clojure compatility status / expectations. E.g. if user notes a difference in behavior compared to Clojure, it could be considered a bug in Phel if there's no (documented) reason for feature the be missing or differing.
Hey everyone! I'm Elias, a 28-year-old software engineer at Splice, working remotely from Portland, OR. I got into Clojure back in December as I decided I wanted to find a "perfect" programming language for my side projects, and Clojure was it. I loved watching the Clojure documentary with you all, and I find the philosophy behind this language very inspiring. In fact, it inspired me to buy a ticket to Clojure/Conj 2026 so I can meet you all! I'm currently working on an in-browser Reagent + DataScript playground using Scittle for preview and hot-reloading on every keystroke. Not only is it written in full-stack ClojureScript (Hono on the backend, re-frame on the frontend), but the app itself, being basically a ClojureScript IDE, will encourage me to practice my Clojure every day by making small sketches for the ideas that pop into my head. I also plan on using it for quick data manipulation by loading external datasets via DataScript. This is still in the early works, but hopefully it’ll be in a state to show off sometime soon. I’m trying not to use AI too much (only for explanations and boilerplate), so my development time is slow but extremely rewarding and allows me to implement everything the correct way.