On Tue, 13 Jul 2021 21:02:28 -0300, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:
> Feedback of any kind is welcome, but particularly on UI / UX
> issues. You can get a pretty good idea of the supported syntax by
> looking at the tests.

I read through the commits and it looks good to me implementation-wise.

I'm probably not the most experienced lisper around so take my ideas
with a grain of salt. I did work professionally on a Clojure codebase
for a couple of years and I've written a bunch of small programs in
Racket but that's pretty much it.

But looking at the sexp parser and the implementation of logical
connectors I can't help but think that isn't this patchset implementing
a tiny subset of a lisp? And wouldn't a full embedded lisp be much, much
more powerful?

I'd at least consider embedding something like s7 [0] or Janet [1],
writing bindings for enough Xapian functionality, and then writing the
rest in the lisp itself. That way you'd get a more powerful and
extensible sexp implementation, and you'd implement most of it in a much
more ergonomic language.

Of course I don't really know Xapian and I'm not sure of the design
goals of this sexp parser, but my experience with HoneySQL [2] tells me
that building queries with a lisp from lisp data structures can be
unbelievably powerful.

Hannu

[0]: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/s7.html
[1]: https://janet-lang.org/
[2]: https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql
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