Lisp Flavoured Erlang

Give yourself to the Lisp side of the Force!

LFE

Origins

LFE has many origins, depending upon whether you're looking at Lisp (and here), Erlang (and here), or LFE-proper. The LFE community of contributors embraces all of these and more.

A Modern Taste

To get a sense of what all of these have evolved to in the case of LFE, click the magical code button below. Additionally, the "Resources" section provides links to project code that can give you a better sense of our flavor.

see code example

Behind the Scenes at LFE.io

You will notice that this site has interesting background images; though blurred, you might be able to discern the original source...

We have the 1910 edition of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, John McCarthy sipping from an LFE mug; a PDP-11; a Tektronix terminal displaying an LFE ring benchmark; a data center; a Raspberry Pi cluster. All of these relate to LFE either via a Lisp heritage or current work being done in the LFE, Erlang, or Lisp communities.

They are our past and our future ... all are interconnected.

Erlang VM
Utterly Terrifying
Alien Technology
Language Lab

Erlang VM

No global data
No mutable data
Pattern matching and guards
Compiler and interpreter
Hot upgrading of deployed code
The Banarama of languages

Fault-tolerant
Massively scalable
Concurrent
Soft real-time
Open. Telecom. Platform.

Functions and variables with separate namespaces (LFE is a Lisp-2)
Low-hygiene Macros
Homoiconicity
In-REPL Function and macro definitions
Easy borrowing from decades of alien software libraries

Language Lab

All the benefits and powers of a Lisp combined with the efficiency of the Actor Model and Erlang's light-weight processes.

Experiment with creating distributed systems.
Easily write your own compilers.
Create DSLs on-demand.
Take advantage of 1000s of cores without having to change your code.

Presentations

Over the years there have been several LFE presentations given at conference and meetups. We have gathered them together here for your convenience and viewing pleasure.

Download

The latest LFE stable release [ zip | tar ]
LFE development release [ zip | tar ]
Source on Github

Quick Start

Want to take LFE for a quick moonshot? Get started now!

LFE Github Org

Did you know there are two Github orgs (core & community) dedicated to LFE? You can find most LFE projects in the world either here as their main repo, or as a forked mirror.

Projects

Here is a sampling of some of the projects in the LFE community.

LFE project repo on Github. It's the reason we're here.

lfetool has everything you need to easily create LFE-based projects and integrate with such tools as kerl, rebar, and relx.

HTML as S-Expressions for LFE projects.

LFE + Java: Erlang is starting to peek into Clojure's backyard (work in progress).

Let LiffyBot run your IRC channel (work in progress).

lfest provides Compojure-like routing for RESTful services and web apps built on LFE and YAWS.

Community

LFE has a small but growing community consisting of language developers, hackers, and general enthusiasts with a wide variety of experience and backgrounds. At any given point on the mail list or IRC channel, you may find yourself conversing with Clojurists, Erlangers, Haskellers, Javaheads, Lispers, OCamlers, Pythonistas, Rubyists, Schemers, etc.

The unifying element?

A deep appreciation of the Erlang VM and a perverse love of parentheses.

how to connect