Minimalism

Library • Built with just leather, paper, wood, and ink.

The Lisp we’ve built has been purposefully minimal. We’ve only added the fewest number of core structures and builtins. If we chose these carefully, as we did, then it should allow us to add in everything else required to the language.

The motivation behind minimalism is two-fold. The first advantage is that it makes the core language simple to debug and easy to learn. This is a great benefit to developers and users. Like Occam’s Razor it is almost always better to trim away any waste if it results in a equally expressive language. The second reason is that having a small language is also aesthetically nicer. It is clever, interesting and fun to see how small we can make the core of a language, and still get something useful out of the other side. As hackers, which we should be by now, this is something we enjoy.