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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

It just breaks my heart to see Uncle Bob seduced by a Java-family language right when C++ is getting increasingly fun. He suffered through the bad old days when C++ was only fast and powerful, and is now missing out on the good new days.

I guess he's happy. At least he isn't touting Haskell. Bon Voyage, Bob!

But somebody needs to break it to him that Lisp is not a functional language. Or, if it is, so is C++.

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You can argue whether Lisp is a functional language, but Clojure certainly is. When written well, the bulk of your code will be pure functions taking and returning immutable data or passing around pure functions. https://clojure.org/about/functional_programming

Many lisps like Common Lisp are multi-paradigm (imperative, OO, functional). Some like Clojure are built on OO runtime and can call Java OO code, but in general heavily favor immutability and functional programming. So you're focusing on one sentence (that is arguably incorrect or only partly correct) and missing the intent of the article.

> that Lisp is not a functional language. Or, if it is, so is C++

You're missing the point. Everybody can write Fortran in any language.

There is nothing "Java-family" about Clojure. Merely the run-time.

> But somebody needs to break it to him that Lisp is not a functional language

Lisp is not a language at all. It's an idea. And if you grok the awesomeness of that idea you can make any kind of language using it: functional, OOP, relational, whatever.

Bob is talking about Clojure. Clojure is a functional Lisp.

Clojure isn’t “Java family” any more than anything running on top if a C runtime is C family. Clojure is also a lot more if a functional programming language than Common Lisp is.

I also disagree with you on C++. Cc+11 was a fantastic improvement, C++14 added some missing stuff — at this point I was sold and eagerly awaiting C++17 — but when 17 arrivd and when I saw what 20 adds... it has become so complex that I don’t understand it at all anymore. I used to scoff at the people who said C++ was too complex, but after ~18 years of using the language its now reached a point where I am no longer comfortable using it. I see code that uses C++17 and recently 20 and I have no idea what its doing anymore. I am no longer confident that I can write safe, non bug-ridden code in C++.

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