Welcome to Spry!¶
Spry borrows homoiconicity from Rebol and Lisp, free form syntax from Forth and Rebol, words of different types from Rebol, good data structure literal support from JavaScript and the general coding experience and style from Smalltalk. It also has a few ideas of its own, like an interesting argument passing mechanism and a relatively novel take on OO.
Spry is dynamically typed and while trying to recreate the "feeling" of Smalltalk this is an experiment in trying out "interesting" approaches.
The current reference implementation of Spry is in a few thousand lines of Nim which gives very easy access to C/C++ and Nim eco systems. It also enables native threads and high performance garbage collection. This interpreter is modular and can be compiled statically to around 100kb in size. It can also be compiled to JavaScript, as this REPL here on the website shows.
Currently Spry can run as a standalone interpreter called spry (just like Python), as an embedded interpreter in a Nim executable (easy to make single binary programs!) or as an interactive interpreter, a REPL, called ispry.
There is a fair bit of example code available including cross platform UI examples. Take a look at Tasting Spry for a sense of the language.
Vision of Spry¶
My vision of Spry is to support 100% live coding in a Smalltalk style immersive environment, but much more integrated with the various eco systems outside of Spry. Think Smalltalk, but distilled to the core and without the island isolation.
I also wish to explore other things with it like simple game development, perhaps aimed primarily at kids but also the live image model in a distributed multi user scenario by using a modern embedded database, cloud and networking technology. Yeah, not entirely super clear but if you know about GemStone/S, try visualize that on a global cloud scale, although simplified in architecture.