Top all-time · #2333
Lisperator.net
Personal blog · lisperator.net/blogprogramming
Lisperator.net is a personal blog at lisperator.net about programming. Since 2012, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “How to implement a programming language in JavaScript”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Marijn Haverbeke's lisperator.net is cited for its free JavaScript tutorial on writing parsers, interpreters and compilers (pltut), plus the SLip Lisp system and AST notes.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called a "super interesting link" and a "great help" for building a language; praised for teaching interpreters without regex tricks; one commenter says to "che
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How to implement a programming language in JavaScript10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2014-09-04
- Slip – A Lisp System in JavaScript5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-08-14
- Why Lisp?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-08-16
- /s/slip/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-26
- Ymacs Reloaded: Emacs-like editor in the browser2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-06-14
- Slip – A Lisp System in JavaScript2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-10
What Hacker News says?
That was a super interesting link, thank you. For the ontological problem, I presume you're referring to how there are so many differing ideas of how to represent ASTs (apologies for mixing languages, these URLs were just handy) : * https://lisperator.net/uglifyjs/ast#nodes * https://github.com/estree/estree#the-estree-spec * ... likely others which makes it hard for ls1 to ask ls2 about "the for-of iteration variab…
Comment linking /uglifyjs/ast
on “Eglot has landed on master: Emacs now has a built-in LSP client”Submitted How to implement a programming language in JavaScript as a story · 153 points
HN discussionI wrote some time back a tutorial on this: http://lisperator.net/pltut/ — but the implementation language is JS, and the language we implement is quite trivial (no objects, inheritance etc.; but does have lexical scope, first-class functions and continuations). I think Java is ugly, but putting this knowledge in an accessible book is great. Typography is also very nice.
Comment linking /pltut/
on “Show HN: How to write a recursive descent parser”Submitted How to Implement a Programming Language in JavaScript as a story · 99 points
HN discussionI wrote some similar thoughts here: http://lisperator.net/blog/why-lisp/ (in the "organic growth" section). Sadly I don't get to do much Lisp these days, but it remains my favorite programming language (CL, more exactly). And yeah, it's sad that "programming-as-teaching" fades out of fashion. Now that I know what it's like, working in an environment that doesn't support it always leaves a bitter taste. Let's just ho…
Comment linking /blog/why-lisp/
on “Show HN: Full Stack Lisp – A book in progress about writing Common Lisp apps”Submitted Why Lisp? as a story · 91 points
HN discussionI wrote a tutorial some time back — http://lisperator.net/pltut/ — also targeted at JS. It walks you through parsing, evaluating, continuations and CPS compiling.
Comment linking /pltut/
on “A programming language in 450 lines of JavaScript”Submitted Slip – A Lisp System in the Browser as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI'm building a language right now and I found this tutorial to be a great help: http://lisperator.net/pltut/ Here's the language I'm building: https://github.com/kevwu/kythera
Comment linking /pltut/
on “Ask HN: Resources for building a programming language?”Submitted Why Lisp? as a story · 10 points
HN discussionMandatory link to lisperator : http://lisperator.net/pltut/
Comment linking /pltut/
on “Show HN: How to write a tiny compiler”Submitted How to implement a programming language in JavaScript as a story · 9 points
HN discussionHey, nice to see Ymacs is still used somewhere else than on my website :) I don't know if you've been tracking it lately, but there was a big overhaul last year [1]. The version in your second link doesn't seem to work in current Firefox. If you'd like to update and need any help, please feel free to get in touch. (also, there's still some of your code in Ymacs :) although I kinda broke filename completion...) [1] h…
Comment linking /blog/ymacs-reloaded/
on “Web Embeddable Common Lisp”Submitted Pull Request Based Development Sucks as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIn SLip: https://lisperator.net/s/slip/ SL-USER> (time (loop for i below (expt 10 8) count t)) Evaluation time: 19376ms 100000000 SL-USER> (time (loop for i below 1000000 count t)) Evaluation time: 272ms 1000000 SL-USER> (defun fib (n) (if (< n 2) n (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2))))) #'FIB SL-USER> (time (fib 32)) Evaluation time: 1601ms 2178309 These timings are in Firefox; Chromium is almost 2x faster. Also, it doe…
Comment linking /s/slip/
on “Web Embeddable Common Lisp”Submitted Slip – A Lisp System in JavaScript as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI like this article: http://lisperator.net/pltut/ it's in javascript and does a good job at teaching writing interpreters withtout regex tricks. There is even a compiler tutorial at the end.
Comment linking /pltut/
on “Let’s Build a Simple Interpreter, Part 1”Submitted Slip – A Lisp System in JavaScript as a story · 4 points
HN discussionif anyone found this interesting, i recommend reading http://lisperator.net/pltut/ It called "How to implement a programming language" its in JS and its made by the guy who's behind uglifyJS
Comment linking /pltut/
on “A Simple Compiler in JavaScript”Submitted A JavaScript Sudoku Solver as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSee http://lisperator.net/slip/ ;-)
Comment linking /slip/
on “Show HN: Ymacs - Emacs in the browser with Dropbox, GDrive, etc”Submitted Ymacs Reloaded: Emacs-like editor in the browser as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI just want to note that the new CoffeeScript compiler is using ESCodeGen as a backend, which is doing the source map heavy lifting. Anyone writing a compiler which targets JS can use ESCodeGen as a backend and get source maps pretty much for free. Awesome news all around! https://github.com/Constellation/escodegen Note: I do not want it to seem like I want to take anything away from Michael Ficarra and the new Coff…
Comment linking /blog/uglifyjs-v2-news/
on “CoffeeScript source maps”Submitted How to implement a programming language (tutorial for beginners) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGoogling turned up several on just the first page of results: http://www.biwascheme.org/ http://sisc-scheme.org/sisc-online.php http://lisperator.net/slip/ http://alex.nisnevich.com/ecmachine/ But the parent is really the right answer -- ClojureScript is actually targeted at meeting modern web development challenges and has a thriving ecosystem of powerful tools for the same.
Comment linking /slip/
on “Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]”Submitted How to implement a programming language in JavaScript as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMihai Bazon (of uglify.js fame) is also a big time lisper. His entire blog is powered by Common LISP. Check it out. AFAIR, he developed a browser based SLIME environment too http://lisperator.net/
Comment linking /
on “YoungLispers tell how they got into lisp”Submitted QUEEN, chess, and writing fast Lisp code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionlive demo at https://lisperator.net/s/slip/
Comment linking /s/slip/
on “Slip – A Lisp System in JavaScript”Submitted How to implement a programming language in JavaScript as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
