I tried fennel for a game jam and honestly was pretty disappointed. The way lisp languages are pitched here, I thought I was in for a mind opening experience, but instead the end experience was pretty much identical to lua in ever meaningful way, the only differences felt surface level (I.e. using closures, and parentheses).
I'm forever indebt to lisp for giving JS it's saving graces (closures and FN as first class citizens), but I think we some honestly on what the end experience really is.
Did you program against a REPL connected to your game, with state maintaining hot reload? Does your editor support working with s-expressions (eg. slurping and barfing)?
Batch processing style programming (write to file, save, run, stop, repeat) in Lisp removes some 3/4 of what the language(s) offer. It's especially so if one is navigating code by text rather than structure, eg. jump-to-next-word instead of jump-to-next-expression.
What is magical about Lisps, esp. the ones that are fully featured in this sense (Common Lisp, Clojure), is that you're programming a running program without losing state when you re-evaluate code.
That is magic. Instead of doing the save-compile-run-setup-conditions-wait-for-result-repeat hundreds of times per session, you run and write the code for your given problem when it arises during gameplay.
On top of that you throw on things like paredit, condition systems and you're and order of magnitude less frustrated and dare I say it, productive, than when you constantly have to churn through constant transitions between the code-in-file and game-in-memory disparity.
For games especially, things like test driven development make no sense because state is so insanely tangled. So you either hope for the best, or you program against a live game. I prefer the second option.
> The way lisp languages are pitched here, I thought I was in for a mind opening experience
Have you used a Lisp with a connected REPL? Not the one that you have to type instructions into - the one that allows you to send any expression at point, with virtually zero ceremony to it, basically letting you evaluate any part of the program on the fly? And that REPL can be even remote - at work we use one running in a kubernetes cluster, we can change our APIs and experiment without not only redeploying things, we don't even have to save our changes. Can you imagine being able to try your code without saving, linting, linking, compiling, deploying - all that on the fly? It is truly mind-opening experience. It's so fucking nice, it's like playing a video game. I do understand why it's appealing to build actual video games that way.
Using a Lisp without structural editing tools and without a REPL is like having a Ferrari without a working engine - you'd have to pedal it to move around, it's ridiculous.
The way to appreciate a Lisp is to use an actual Lisp, not a syntax transpiler for a non-Lispy language.
Common Lisp, Racket or Scheme with a good REPL and editor integration are light years ahead than Fennel which is little more Lua-with-parens.
> Fennel is little more Lua-with-parens.
Totally. And Clojure is Java-with-parens; Janet is C-with-parens; LFE - Erlang-with-parens; Elisp is a Stallman's erotic fantasy, neatly wrapped in parens. Only Common Lisp is an "actual Lisp for immortal souls" - the rest is for peasants.
Fennel isn't a "real" Lisp. It's more of an aesthetic layer on top of Lua than anything else. Try learning Scheme.
Give me a break. What's not "real" about it? It's homoiconic, it supports connecting to a REPL, it has macros, first-class functions and proper lexical scoping. What else do you want, Guy Steele personally sending you an emoji whenever you install it?