Hacker News Reader

Comment by d0m | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people regard lisp language as toys or "scientists" languages that isn't usable in the real world to solve real problem. (It might not be the opinion on hacker news, obviously). So, then, come clojure which is a lisp based language that is smartly integrated with the java platform.. so now, you get the power of lisp with the usability and friendliness of java.

View on HN

Well the thing is, 50 years ago, the Lisp guys were 30 years ahead of everyone else. Back then, they would say, look at our huge standard library! and everyone would be impressed. But next to J2EE or .NET or even batteries-included distros of Python, Ruby, Tcl, Perl + CPAN, the Lisp library looks pretty paltry[1], especially when it comes to interacting with the outside world (databases, GUIs, web programming, etc etc) - the sorts of things that working programmers do every day. Most people aren't researching algorithms, they're doing what we used to call forms and reports.

Clojure attempts to fix this by piggybacking on the vast Java platform. F# is another that uses this strategy.

[1] Want to use Oracle? Check out Franz's pricing. Commercial database connectivity is free with all the other languages I mentioned. I'm just not interested if I can't kick the tyres and take it for a spin.

i dont find java to be very friendly.

i find boilerplate and attempts to protect me from myself to be the opposite of friendly. i also find jvm infrastructure to be less easy to deal with than the infrastructure that many other languages have.

i would replace 'friendliness of java' with 'breadth of support for'.

Compared to many of the alternatives, Javas is very friendly. There aren't too many ways you can shoot yourself in the head, and it mostely does what you would expect it to do.

We have a difference of opinion on what is 'friendly'. I don't consider protecting me from shooting myself in the head to be 'friendly', I would call that 'paternalistic'.

I would call allowing me to easily express what I want 'friendly'. I find lisps, smalltalk and their brethren to be friendly under my definition.

(As the author of the first comment), I said friendly in the sens beginner-friendly. Where they are a tons of documentation (online and books) available, tons of libraries, tons of person actually using it, lots of job opportunities, easy to learn, etc.

I know some authors recommend learning lisp as a first language because there are not a lot of syntax and you can focus on the important problems. However, from my experience, my university colleague hated lisp and prolog, preferred C++ and really liked C# and Java. Lots of them were pretty beginners or bad programmers, but still, you can't start somewhere and be already an expert.

So, hope it clarified what I mean by Java being friendly. And then, Clojure might be less friendly than java.. but still, in this mentality, might be more friendly than scheme .

It's friendly in more the social/cooperative sense than the sense that it's easy to work with in itself: there are a lot of very good libraries, the runtime is pretty much fully baked, and you get a wide choice of development tools.

So there is a breadth of support you don't get elsewhere? I wouldn't argue with that. When it comes to breadth of support, it is hard to argue against java, php etc.

One of my favorite things about Clojure is how it does away with much of this boiler-plate. With macros and the general style of lisp, I turned a very boiler-platey java project into an extremely compact clojure project.

I really enjoy how I can look at the clojure code and easily see the flow of what I'm actually trying to do.

Why don't you use C then? It would let you freely shoot yourself on the foot.

because i prefer the 'meta power' that smalltalk and lisp provide me.

plus, i hate managing memory when i don't have to.

if i still wrote stuff that had to snuggle up to the hardware, i would probably still be using c or c++ but, i'm not writing that type of code anymore so i don't have need to use c or c++.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com