Building with Parenscript and Preact: Difference between revisions

Parenscript is fundamentally flawed. It's a super-lightweight papering-over of JavaScript, and you become aware of that harsh reality immediately. It makes an attempt to look like the surface syntax of Common Lisp while maintaining none of its semantics, so you kind of have to juggle in your mind the JavaScript you want to get, the Parenscript you have to write, and the Common Lisp that would do something else if executed as CL. It's especially odd since JS has no cons cells, and Parenscript doesn't try to provide them-- <code>(cons 1 nil)</code> just becomes <code>cons(1, null);</code>. So it looks superficially a lot like CL, but isn't like it semantically at all. On top of that, Parenscript has a few bugs: it will just miscompile things sometimes, specifically its <code>loop</code> construct, and it has a bad habit of not declaring variables when you use <code>let</code>, which doesn't work in <code>use strict"</code> mode.