Jose Reales

Phel, a native Lisp for PHP

Can learning Lisp make you a better PHP developer? Discover Phel, a functional language that transpiles to PHP with 100% ecosystem interoperability.

Phel, a native Lisp for PHP
#1about 2 minutes

Introducing Phel, a Lisp dialect for the PHP ecosystem

Phel is a functional programming language inspired by Clojure that transpiles directly to PHP, making it fully interoperable.

#2about 1 minute

Comparing functional and object-oriented paradigms

Functional programming emphasizes immutable data and declarative code with no side effects, contrasting with object-oriented programming's mutable state.

#3about 1 minute

Understanding the basic syntax of Phel with an example

A "Hello World" example demonstrates Phel's Lisp-like syntax, including namespaces, defining constants, and creating and calling functions.

#4about 2 minutes

Exploring Phel's data types and control flow statements

Phel includes basic types, persistent data structures like lists and maps, and control flow statements such as `if`, `case`, and `loop`.

#5about 1 minute

Using native PHP functions and classes within Phel

The `php/` prefix allows full interoperability, enabling the use of any native PHP function, class, or object directly from Phel code.

#6about 2 minutes

A live demo of a snake game built with Phel

A demonstration showcases a complete snake game running in the terminal, built entirely in Phel to illustrate its practical application.

#7about 1 minute

The project's goal and community resources for learning

Phel aims to introduce functional programming concepts to PHP developers rather than replace PHP, with resources available on GitHub and Gitter.

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