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no one sets out to do a project of meaning or scale and chooses these tools, do they?

We certainly have (Parenscript) and it's vital for two reasons: (1) there are cases where we need to run the same code on either the server or the client; (2) we get the full power of Lisp macros. The latter means our source code is much smaller than JS we would have had to write by hand. Somewhat unexpectedly, there's a key efficiency issue here: making heavy use of abstractions in JS would make our code significantly slower. With Parenscript, we can write concise source code with nice abstractions that compiles to low-level, efficient (but still readable) JS. It's one of those rare times you get to have your cake and eat it too (an adage that really doesn't make sense, yet still always comes up #1 in the search results in my brain!)



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