The Story

I was displeased with the way our culture pushes us towards large, complex templating engines that offer little to no arbitrary code execution, too many %'s and a frustrating amount of overhead. Jinja has loops, ints, native python types, "functions", and (possibly, idk I didn't check) recursion (it probably does). All I want to do is replace one string with another string, and it shouldn't be that hard. Bash seemed like the perfect tool, until you realise all the hoops one must jump through to have recursive evaluation in a heredoc. Not to mention the difficulty of trying to execute a python script without having to create another file.

I have taken it upon myself to solve this problem for all programmers that fell victim to the computer-science-drop-out-to-finance-bitch pipeline, and created a Hand Coded Stringy Lisp.

The Last Language you'll ever want need

All functions evaluate to a lisperal™, there are no variables, only functions that return lisperal™s. Functions are defined using the func builtin, which takes two arguments, a id and a lisperal™

(func foo "{0} {1}")
(foo "hello" "world"); -> "hello world"
(func bar "hello")
(foo (bar) "world"); -> "hello world"
(func baz (foo (bar) "world")); -> "hello world"

There are no ints, floats, or any of those mathy things that made you hate linear algebra, just strings. I did add a stack though

I recognise that this may be a difficult transition for some (and we know all about those), and that edge cases may arise that require something other than strings. So, I have graciously included some built-in functions to aid those that have not yet ascended to a higher plane:

(exit "1")            ; -> exits with exitcode 1
                      ; not very useful in scripts, 
                      ; but handy in the repl

(execute "bash code") ; will execute a file on your disk
(debug)               ; prints functions definitions
(map foo)             ; maps a function 'foo' onto all values on the stack
(push "hello")        ; pushes "hello" onto the stack
(pop)                 ; pops value from stack
(read "filePath")     ; will read each line of a file onto the stack
(eval "(bar)")        ; evaluates code
(source "filePath")   ; will load another slisp file into the current namespace
(concat " ")          ; will concatinate all values on the stack with first 
                      ; as a seperater
(concat " " "1" "2")  ; will return "1 2" and leave the stack untouched

Acknowledgments

• catgirl.sh by Camille for inspiration
• Samie, who can create a pull request to link to herself if she so desires
• Crafting Interpreters by Bob Nystrom for introducing me to little languages
• My cat, Ajax, for reminding me to stretch
• My faithful companion, Chester for 13 wonderful years (R.I.P. 10/07/2023)
• Erik Decker, for answering my calls more often than he should, and because he wanted to be acknowledged
• evrimoztamur, for an orange site comment explaining that looping might actually be a good idea