Hacker News Reader

Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I believe what you're saying is true. I'm a full time Clojure dev and let me tell you, if I give a damn about performance I avoid a lot of the cool parts of the language.

And it gets even more severe with Scala.

As Ruby should demonstrate, languages succeed because the community wants them. Not because they have specific performance characteristics.

View on HN

Ditto with Apache Groovy, which started off as a dynamically typed language to complement Java. The original use case for Groovy was to use it when performance doesn't matter (e.g. scripting, testing, glue code) and Java (or some other statically typed language) when it does.

Unfortunately VMware wasted a lot of resources trying to redefine Groovy as a performant language which could replace Java's use case, or even run on Android (believe it or not).

Hi sorry for off topic question. But how do u feel about clojure ? I am a python developer and really interested in clojure. Do u think it's worthwhile learning ?

Could you define "worthwhile?" Learning lisp is great if you want to be exposed to new functional programming ideas.

I don't really understand your reply. Where you replying to my comment?

I'm saying that your idea that the JVM enables performance for dynamic langiagss, and then that's why the languages succeeded is wrong.

I also think it's wrong to imply IronPython and IronRuby failed for purely performance reasons.

Actually the JVM support for dynamic languages (invokedynamic) was only added after .NET, thanks to IronPython project, created the DLR first as a side project, then eventually released it as part of .NET 4.0.

I imagine only those of us that work regularly with both platforms get it right, when each got what, and even then it is easy to lose track.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com