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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

One of the main objectives of Clojure was interoperability with Java because of the ecosystem. Java and Erlang ecosystems are not comparable.

Also, JVM is great. :)

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That's not true. One of the main objectives of Clojure was to be a hosted language. Not just 'language hosted on JVM'. So idea to make it work on top of Erlang VM is perfectly valid and consistent with original design assumptions.

Except then it might not have had as much uptake (tooling, existing Java libraries, installability to various providers and interoperability with existing systems etc.).

Now that Clojure has a varied and excellent set of libraries of its own maybe some of this is less important, but not all (the ability to interact with existing Java systems is still very useful).

> One of the main objectives of Clojure was to be a hosted language. Not just 'language hosted on JVM'.

Uhm... I always thought it was meant to be a Lisp for JVM. Where did you get your information from?

Whether it's as important now or not is a different matter I suppose, with various targets for the language (including other VMs), but I don't think it's in dispute that originally the extensive java ecosystem was core to what clojure was, and was designed to be.

...but hey, don't take my word for it:

    The net result is that the prospects for Clojure going forward are
    very good. The core model of Clojure has held up well and continues to
    appeal - accessible, robust, thread-safe, efficient dynamic functional
    programming, on a world-class infrastructure, with a huge set of
    libraries. Oh yeah, and it's great fun! 

    - Rich Hickey, 2008
    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure/2CA_H58Cbo0

That might have referred to the CLR and the JVM though since Clojure has targeted both runtimes from the start (although the JVM implementation is leading of course.)

This talk should go into a bit more detail about this: https://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/charles/emerging-langs-cloju...

The erlang ecosystem has new-found life with Elixir. The ecosystem for Elixir is rock-solid. Very high quality libraries abound.

Absolutely. The level of robustness is outstanding for such a new language / ecosystem.

To be fair, and I find this to be a bit of a shame, but most of that robustness and ecosystem comes straight from Erlang, which was always solid. Though I do enjoy the consistency that Elixir brings and the improved macros. I'm a Clojure guy, so I also love the protocols.

Just wanted to say that Erlang vanilla is robust and has a great ecosystem. So Elixir builds itself on top of a solid foundation.

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