I don’t know what to think of Pharen. It’s a little compiler that compiles a Lisp-like language into PHP. PHP seems to be almost as universally reviled as it is universally used, so perhaps this is a useful thing as well as a nice hack. Still, a little voice in the back of my mind keeps repeating, “If you want PHP go use PHP.”
On the other hand, Aubrey Jaffer the author of SLIB and SCM, the Scheme implementation on which Guile was originally based does this sort of thing all the time. After making the same off-by-one mistake in C too many times Jaffer started coding in Scheme. As he put it, “Periodically, a manager will mandate that I perform my work using some particular language or technique (buzzword). I usually comply by writing (adapting) a translator from SCM to that language.” I’ve always admired his approach to this (he’s even written device drivers in Scheme and used his schlep compiler to translate the Scheme code to C.
So perhaps Pharen is a good thing. What do you think?