I don't know if people do introductions here, but I just wanted to say Hi. I'm really a bread baker <http://boxturtlebakery.com> but used to do IT professionally and enjoy exploring ideas. I had written an application for my bakery in Python running against Google's Datastore database. My requirements change very little, but keeping up with the churn of everything in that stack is very annoying. I tried Pharo and enjoyed the Smalltalk development experience, but the churn of research languages is just as bad with things breaking pretty much every year. I wanted to explore functional and statically typed languages and tried Elm. It is very nice, but one is still very much embedded in the browser and JavaScript ecosystem and the churn of running things there is too much for me. Unison is an interesting new language, but it is built on Haskell which is a very research-oriented language and also still in active development. I also thought that a peer-to-peer solution like Holochain would get me away from the cloud providers, but I think things are just not ready yet. I also don't want to pay for expensive hardware and full builds on Rust for the Holochain apps didn't work on my 10-year-old laptop and took over an hour on my newer desktop. I have an application to manage EV chargers running in Factor (a Forth inspired language) and like it overall, but PicoLisp is easier to build from scratch and has a much smaller runtime. Similarly Clojure is a nice Lisp relative, but brings along the whole JVM which doesn't add anything useful for me. I tried Guile Scheme and Janet too and thought PicoLisp was simpler with better functionality for it's own database, debugging, prolog functionality, and web-based applications. I hope that that web approach of just using the browser for just the UI will keep things working on old and changing browsers without all the testing, polyfilling, etc.
My knowledge management is currently on logseq so I'd like to get that into some form of PicoLisp so that I can have something of a literate development environment. I don't want to go to emacs and org-mode so something simpler. Then I'd want to do a couple of database apps with web front-ends in addition to redoing my bakery application while extending it with accounting using the Resource Event Agent model. Thanks for the useful language and helpful documentation. --Abraham Palmer
