# Fennel

20 Hacker News commenters recommended Fennel and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Lisp-style language that compiles to Lua, liked for its clean syntax and easy Lua interop; the most common caveat is hard-to-debug transpiled code.

## Why people recommend it

- Fun and enjoyable to write (5 comments): "there's also the wonderful Fennel possibility which distracts me when I'm bikeshedding" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902635)) "Like eg I have to deal with a lot of lua so I get my lisp rocks off with fennel." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49326264)) "Fennel is really cool! And you can write games in it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659927))
- Nicer syntax for Lua code (5 comments): "provides a nice syntax for Lua, and mostly solves incompatibilities between different Lua(JIT) versions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671742)) "We later moved to Fennel(-lang) based on Lua as it was a slightly better fit for our team" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46903310)) "If you dislike Lua (I'm not a fan) I recommend Fennel" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565891))
- Same language across many configs (4 comments): "Fennel is indispensable for any Lua - mpv, Hammerspoon, AwesomeWM and Neovim configs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48376262)) "from all practical points it felt like almost using the same language everywhere" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862414)) "Just use Fennel. That's what my Hyprland config is written in." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48985678))
- Lisp macros and REPL (3 comments): "slash down dozen lines of Lua boilerplate compressing it into a three-liner Fennel macro" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951468)) "if you want full Lisp syntax you can drop in Fennel." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46369314)) "which means I can have Lispy REPL" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287062))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend
- [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend
- [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend
- [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend
- [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Fennel", https://hackerapproved.com/p/fennel/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).