Joxa is a small semantically clean, functional lisp. It is a general-purpose language encouraging interactive development and a functional programming style. Joxa runs on the Erlang Virtual Machine. Like other Lisps, Joxa treats code as data and has a full (unhygienic) macro system.

Joxa (pronounced 'jocksah') isn't Erlang, though its very compatible. Its not Clojure though there is plenty of shared syntax. It's not Common Lisp though that is the source of the macro system. While Joxa shares elements of many languages, it is its own specific language. of all these languages, and knowing these languages will help you get up to speed with Joxa, but it is its own unique language.

Functional Example - Sieve of Eratosthenes

(ns sieve-of-eratosthenes
        (require lists io)
        (use (joxa-core :as core :only (!=/2))
             (erlang :only (rem/2 +/2))))

(defn sieve (v primes)
  (case v
    ([] primes)
    ((h . t)
      (sieve  (lists/filter (fn (x)
                             (!= (rem x h) 0)) t)
              (+ primes 1)))))

(defn+ sieve (v)
  (sieve (lists/seq 2 v) 1))

Functional Example - Fibonacci

(ns fibonacci
        (use (erlang :only (>/2 -/2 +/2))))

(defn+ fibo (n)
  (case n
    (0 0)
    (1 1)
    (_ (when (> n 0))
     (+ (fibo (- n 1))
        (fibo (- n 2))))))

NOTE: At the moment Joxa is a an beta product. It is used in production, and fully self hosting. However, you should expect to find bugs and hopefully report and/or fix those bugs. There are also still a number of things that need to be done as far as libraries and the like. We encourage you to use Joxa and participate in the community. however, you should expect to run into issues.

Installation

You need to drop Joxa executable in your path, assuming you already have erlang installed. That executable is an 'escript'. An escript is basically a binary executable. However, it depends on the existence (on your machine) of the Erlang Virtual Machine. So either install that now from source or install it from the packaging system on your distribution.

Usage

Usage is quite simple. Run joxa without arguments to bring up the shell.

$> joxa
Joxa 0.1.0

joxa-shell> (defn foo () :hello)
ok
joxa-shell> (foo)
hello
joxa-shell>

To run the compile a joxa file simply run joxa with a -c and the file name.

$> joxa -c my-ns.jxa
$> ls
my-ns.beam

More Information

The Joxa Docs are quite good and are kept up to date. To explore further head over to the docs and start working through the examples.