Optionally install the companion tool I created for live-reloading .fnl and .lua files if you don’t want to be tied to the Renoise script editor and want to use your own code editor. Also grab the fennel-ls docset for editor support
So now you can write Fennel (a Lisp that compiles to Lua) and create music:
Why?
It’s hard to argue against programming being an art form when programs can sound like this:
Programming and creating music are the two things that have always helped me drown out the noise around me (and in my head). It has been a few years, but I still clearly remember the day I found Overtone and Emacs Live, I was instantly hooked and Sam Aaron’s work has inspired me ever since. I realized live coding is about expressing myself and found Lisp to be perfect for that. A language willing to bend at my every whim. Malleable. Mine.
So when I found that:
Renoise was now shipping with support for programmatically creating music in Rust or Lua
The dynamically loaded library behind it was open source and written in Rust
…it was enough for me to be nerd sniped into adding support for Fennel. I would be remiss not to mention Ramsey Nasser’s 8FL which is also a direct inspiration.