Comment by akkartik
I use Lua for almost all my custom tools these days.
I use Lua for almost all my custom tools these days.
Fennel looks quite great! And I love Lisp so there is definitely some allure there. I don't use it for mostly the reasons mentioned in OP:
* to minimize dependencies. Lua < Lua + Fennel. I'm more extreme than OP in that I don't even use LuaRocks. When I need a library I copy it in, and I pick a library that won't change often so that is a reasonable approach. I try to avoid native libraries.
* for even greater stability. Fennel is pretty stable, but I use Lua 5.1 for the most part which hasn't changed since 2008 or so. I'm more extreme than OP in even avoiding later versions of Lua.
Bottomline: the reasons I like Lua have nothing to do with syntax and are much more about these operational meta characteristics of the language. If I cared more about syntax I'd be on Fennel in a heartbeat.
I use Lua the same way, without LuaRocks. I use a Makefile to run my programs on Lua 5.1~5.4 and LuaJIT and compare the output files, to ensure portability across versions.
Why not Fennel?