As a more-or-less neutral observation (I still kind-of like the project): What I find curious - perhaps a sign of these times: After just 2-3 months in development (judging from the repo commits, obviously I have no insight into what came before), the developer already communicates Jolt as a feature-complete, polished (perhaps even mature) Clojure dialect with multiple Jolt-adapted libraries from JVM-Clojure, FFI, Fibers, already with a professional looking and marketing-focussed website, detailled documentation, nREPL support, etc. Things I wouldn’t expect so soon from a language developed (mostly?) by a single person in such an early release stage.

I don’t know how to get a feeling about the actual state of projects like this anymore, so I always remain a bit suspicious. In Clojure, there is the (Rich Hickey inspired) design philosophy of “hammock driven development”, where we don’t rush things, let them simmer while lying in the hammock, sleeping on them, taking a walk, etc. Makes me wonder if projects like this are too rushed these days without thinking things through, discussing design decisions and getting ideas from other people, letting them mature over time. This isn’t specifically about Jolt (I don’t know much about it or its creator), it just inspired the thought, especially when comparing it to projects like Jank which has been years in development, with lots of feedback from the community and Clojure core maintainers as input.

The reason it's possible to move fast here is due to the fact that I'm porting an existing language to a new runtime. All the hard work and hammock time has already been spent by the core Clojure team and the community. I'm not aiming to reinvent the wheel here. Furthermore, having worked with Clojure for nearly two decades now, I have a very good idea of what the language does, and what I need to implement on the host platform.

Once I had the basics bootstrapped, it was really a matter of getting tests passing, and then getting more and more libraries to run on it which allowed me to exercise their own tests. And that's what really made the whole thing possible. It's sort of the ideal scenario where you have very well specified inputs and outputs, and a ton of existing tests to ensure you are implementing the behaviors correctly.

The only other aspect here is performance, and that's addressed by having an extensive benchmark harness which compares with JVM timings. This allows me to see where performance gaps are, and focus on addressing them.

I would be careful in extending my experience of being able to port Clojure to Chez Scheme runtime to working with LLMs in general because in most cases you don't have such well defined parameters when you start.

Not slop, though. The main developer is Dmitri Sotnikov (yogthos), who's been around in the Clojure scene for a long time and knows what he's doing.

However, you're right to point out that the development is moving really fast. I'm building a Clojure compiler for machine learning (https://github.com/sheaf-lang/sheaf), and after 9 months, it's still very far from being production-ready.

Honestly LLM’s really foster hammock driven development.

You're right to be suspicious: it's slop.

I understand the emotions and arguments on all sides, but you have to admit the irony debating if a lisp project implemented on top of a lisp by AI to empower further AI enabled lisp development is not in the original spirit of why all this exists in the first place.