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So thankful to be programming in Clojure the past few years. Thank you, Clojure Team, for all you do!

My favorite things about using Clojure: 1. Runs on the JVM. Battle tested, tons of libraries, and well engineered. 2. Immutable Data Structures. I wouldn't want to live without this safety ever again. 3. LISP syntax - so simple to remember and just basically code functions! I also find reading Clojure code very simple vs other procedural languages. 4. REPL development. 5. Transducers - not unique to Clojure, but just love them so listed it.

Great language.

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When you say immutable data structures, do you mean all lisp data structures are immutable? It’s been awhile since I’ve worked with lisp (and that was implementing a MAL not actually writing lisp.)

Clojure data structures are immutable [1], core to its principles.

1 https://clojure.org/reference/data_structures

Ah okay that’s cool then. I thought you were calling out some low level implementation detail of lisp I had overlooked. I’m trying to build a lisp as the intermediate of my new toy programming language. So I wanna get that right.

No it's a Clojure thing. Other lisps may vary.

About the syntax. I tend to prefer Scheme because (, [ and { mean the same thing, whether in Clojure they are different constructs. How do you feel about this minor point?

I guess for me, I like having them be different things, like they are in Clojure. But that could certainly be because Clojure is my first and only exposure to a LISP type syntax.

> (, [ and { mean the same thing...

That's not a feature of Scheme. It must be a feature of the implementation you use. (Which one?) E.g. in R7RS, [ ] and { } are explicitly reserved for future language extensions.

https://standards.scheme.org/official/r7rs.pdf

My last Lisp project was using Racket, but when it was called PLT Scheme. It's been a long time since then :)

It seems like only yesterday... but you're right, we are old. :)

I was never a big PLT user -- Chicken Scheme for life! -- but they have always been about pushing language boundaries, I'm not surprised to hear that they supported an extended syntax.

I think the clojure syntax, with those symbols differentiated, is a pretty great choice.

The choice of default meanings is good too, lists/application, indexed sequences and k/v mappings are useful widely used primitive constructs (clojure makes sets (the math meaning, unordered collection, no dupes) with #{} which is handy).

It cleans up the code nicely, having these literals, and now I find non-clojure styles to be a bit annoying to read with the extra noise from contructor function calls.

And when describing data/DSLs using these literals people generally carry the general meanings over, so things can be a bit more intuitive. And in a lot of places just using ('s and ['s in a way that makes it easy to disambiguate them when reading some DSL or literal value also makes for nicer reading of code (just in terms of a bit less mental parsing effort).

I'm the type to not be immediately a fan of extra syntax added to a lisp, but I've been convinced that edn notation is pretty wonderful and I've been converted.

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