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World Congress 2023 • Oct 23, 2023

Phel, a native Lisp for PHP

Jose Reales

Want to write Clojure-style Lisp without leaving PHP? Meet Phel, a native functional dialect that brings pure functions and immutable data structures directly to your PHP runtime.

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#1 about 2 min

Origins and architectural concept of the Phel language

The history of the open-source project and its foundation as a Lisp dialect compiling to PHP.

#2 about 2 min

Core functional principles and basic Phel syntax demonstration

Contrasting functional immutability against object-oriented state before introducing basic Lisp parenthesis syntax.

#3 about 2 min

Native data types and control structures in Phel

Exploring essential functional data structures, conditional operators, and looping mechanisms unique to the language.

#4 about 1 min

Seamless interoperability and object instantiation with native PHP

Accessing native PHP functions, instantiating objects, and leveraging the Composer ecosystem directly from Phel code.

#5 about 1 min

Exploring the read-eval-print loop and Docker environment

Utilizing an official Docker image to quickly launch an interactive interpreter for real-time development.

#6 about 2 min

Demonstrating a terminal-based Snake game built in Phel

A practical code walkthrough of building an interactive terminal application using pure functional logic and recursion.

#7 about 2 min

Compiler refactoring insights and educational goals of Phel

Recent architecture updates to the compiler and community resources for teaching functional concepts to PHP engineers.

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