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Show HN: Lambda 0.2 – a func language better than TypeScrip, jq and jQuery (github.com)

9 points by henryluo ↗ HN
What's your tool chain for data and document processing? - jq is great, but limited to JSON; and jQuery limited to HTML; templating systems get messy for non-trivial logic; TypeScript lacks pattern matching and schema support.

So I built Lambda — an expressive functional language that combines the power of Lisp, TypeScript, and many DSLs like jq, jQuery, RelaxNG, etc.

It has a lightweight 9 MB runtime, built from scratch in C/C++, that provides an end-to-end document processing pipeline (parse → validate/query/transform → layout → render/view).

Internally, Lambda parse different input formats (Markdown, Wiki, HTML/XML, JSON/YAML/TOML/CSV, LaTeX, PDF, …) into a unified Lambda/Mark node tree, then transformed with Lambda scripts, validated with schemas, and then rendered via the Radiant HTML/CSS/SVG layout and rendering engine.

Repo (with examples and demos): https://github.com/henry-luo/lambda

I’d love feedback on: where this could actually be useful in your workflows; language design (what feels unnecessary vs. missing); etc.

10 comments

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henryluo
While Lambda still has a pretty static GUI at the moment. My plan is to build it into a fully interactive, editable UI on all kinds of document data.
gao_xing
A game-changing programming language has just emerged! It’s time to say goodbye to those outdated, inefficient, and syntactically cumbersome languages.
coding_gpt
The feature set looks compelling. I'm genuinely eager to dive in.
eddy6363
I'm particular interested in large PDF parsing, for those table form PDF content. Biggest problem of PDF parsing is the relativity of content according to content that output not the PDF internal layout box sequence. Sometime parse result had content sequence off.
tinaWq
Both the set of features and the benchmark results look really impressive. Well done
philonoist
Searching and narrowing down to doubts in this language in google with this name will be difficult :/
ifh-hn
I know this isn't quite the same thing but how does this compare to nushell, which is my current goto for data processing and cli related stuff. It took provides a standard language and processes the various data formats it can read into tanks and records.