December 23, 2025
Brace yourself: Lisp ahead
Learn Lisp/Fennel Programming Against Neovim
Neovim learns Lisp; commenters cry 'Emacs déjà vu' and mock 'AI era' mantra
TLDR: A series teaches Neovim plugin building with Fennel (a Lisp), aiming at interactive, functional coding. Comments roast the repeated “AI era” pitch and joke it’s Emacs déjà vu, while supporters say it’s a solid way to learn modern development despite AI hype.
A new series teaches how to build plugins for the code editor Neovim using Fennel, a friendly Lisp that runs on Lua. The author pitches it as a guide to “interactive development” and “functional programming,” with chapters on parentheses-based editing, pure functions, and even macros—while repeating the phrase “in the AI era” like a hype track. The crowd noticed. One top comment rolled its eyes at the slogan, turning the thread into a running gag: how many times did they say it? Meanwhile, old-school devs hit snooze on the novelty, joking that turning a text editor into a full development environment with Lisp is basically Emacs cosplay. Cue the meme wars: “Neovim becoming Emacs” jokes, “brace vs parenthesis” quips, and the inevitable drinking game for every AI mention. Still, some readers cheered the series for making big ideas accessible, arguing that even if AI helps write code, humans still need to debug and think—exactly the author’s point. Others pushed back: why reinvent the wheel when we have mature tools? Love it or roast it, the thread proves one thing—Lisp dreams never die, they just switch editors.
Key Points
- •The series teaches Neovim plugin development using Fennel to explain Lisp, functional programming, and interactive development.
- •It provides setup guidance, including installation, plugins, formatting, and introduces Lua interoperability and LuaRocks.
- •A Fennel crash course covers Lisp syntax and core language constructs, plus extensions for Lua tables and the nfnl library.
- •Advanced topics include interactive development commands, S-expression editing, macros, data-oriented programming, and FP idioms.
- •Practical sections progress from Hello World plugins to standard architecture and debugging, with case studies like auto-conjure, a Conjure Piglet client, and WebSocket.