[Ask HN] Is clojure really a modern lisp?

2 points·morphir··5 comments

It usually ends up being the lisp we point newbies towards. Wouldn't a scheme implementation like PLT-scheme or Chicken be just as good, if not even better? Clojure is too much of a moving animal to be considered newbie friendly in my opinion.

So why is Clojure considered to be a modern lisp?

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Clojure was the first lisp that I could seriously get into. I have a java background and the familiarity of JVM was partly helpful when I was learning it. I guess for people who are new to both java and lisp, it may be bit harder.

The language changing fast wasn't a concern to me then, and I was putting lot of time to keeping up with the changes by lurking in the mailing list and irc. It was fascinating to watch language design happen in front of my eyes. I think newbies would do fine with clojure (particularly at its current relatively stable state). I guess it just takes a bit of an effort.

Perhaps because it is a modern lisp. I am not sure why anyone would direct newbs towards it since it is as you mention in flux. Though it seems like it should settle down some since it had its 1.0 release.

1. It's backed by the entire Java library ecosystem. 2. It's syntax is a little bit improved but still maintains the code as data that makes lisp lisp. 3. defprotocol and deftype (they promise to be awesome)

Clojure has all the properties of a modern lisp. It compiles into java bytecode and keeps data and code separate. This is not possible to do with the .NET CLR bytecode representation because of the way it handles unsafe pointers, but it should be corrected in the next edition of LLVM.

could you explain more about how the .NET CLR treats unsafe pointers differently. Any links?

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