I always say this when it comes up but fennel is very very impressive as a language project. Lua is much beloved but my professional experience is that working with it gets gnarly much faster than most other languages. Fennel focuses on a small set of the worst lua issues and addresses them without getting distracted or bogged down in language design extravagances or lisp nerd semiotics.
The decision to strictly adhere to lua runtime semantics was initially repulsive to me, but I've come to appreciate the incredible wisdom of that approach. The practical experience of using lua is that because of the constraints of the language, every lua runtime is in some ways custom & unique. This decision of fennel's creator allows you to drop fennel onto any lua codebase, of any version, with any amount of custom freak shit grafted in, and just use it. Not only use it, but hook its compiler into the lua module loader system, and freely & transparently mix functions and tables between the two languages. A life raft in decrepit legacy lua codebases.
The restraint and technical focus of this language led to me checking out janet, another project of its creator. I've also come to really like that language, it makes some similarly minor-seeming but brilliant decisions like including PEGs in the core lang instead of regex.
Anyway try fennel, if you have to interact with a lot of lua pattern match alone will improve your life. Try janet too it's cool.
I think Fennel and Janet went separate ways fairly early on, and the creator of Fennel focussed primarily on Janet whilst the current maintainer of Fennel is responsible for much (most?) of what you see in Fennel today...So some very different design choices between the two languages, i believe.
The decision to strictly adhere to lua runtime semantics was initially repulsive to me, but I've come to appreciate the incredible wisdom of that approach. The practical experience of using lua is that because of the constraints of the language, every lua runtime is in some ways custom & unique. This decision of fennel's creator allows you to drop fennel onto any lua codebase, of any version, with any amount of custom freak shit grafted in, and just use it. Not only use it, but hook its compiler into the lua module loader system, and freely & transparently mix functions and tables between the two languages. A life raft in decrepit legacy lua codebases.
The restraint and technical focus of this language led to me checking out janet, another project of its creator. I've also come to really like that language, it makes some similarly minor-seeming but brilliant decisions like including PEGs in the core lang instead of regex.
Anyway try fennel, if you have to interact with a lot of lua pattern match alone will improve your life. Try janet too it's cool.