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Comment by Gollapalli | Hacker News Reader

Increasingly, I don't see clojure as primarily a matter of the clojure-on-jvm implementation, but as a distinct and (generally) hosted dialect of lisp. Clojurescript is a clojure. Janet is a clojure. ClojureCLR is a clojure. Fennel is a clojure. Babashka is a clojure. Ferret is (kind of) a clojure. Maybe someday we'll have a bare-metal clojure. So far as I can tell, the lisp landscape (land of lisp?) has changed from common-lisps and schemes, to common-lisps, schemes, and clojures.

IMHO. Maybe I overexaggerate. Anyway, the author, from my perspective has decided that clojure IS in fact for him, but clojure on the JVM is not, so he chooses to use a different one.

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Idk why, but this really rubs me the wrong way. It feels like marketing-speak. Clojure _is_ it's own thing, and so are the other languages (Janet, Fennel etc) that you seem to be detracting as some sort of Clojure spin-offs. Aside from all being lisp-like languages they have little in common that is exclusive of modern programming languages in general.

>feels like marketing speak

I've been told this a couple times. I doubt I'd thrive in that world though, unless I was selling something I actually gave a damn about.

IDK, is guile a scheme? guile is it's own thing, but it's definitely a scheme. What about racket? Racket has a whole bunch of stuff that mit-scheme doesn't. But it's still kind of in the scheme family. That's the parallel I was drawing. That and the statement that Hickey made in his History of Clojure that Clojurescript _was_ clojure, not some kind of spinoff.

I'm certainly not detracting from Janet and Fennel, but they _are_ quite close to clojure proper. There is a clear lineage.

No, I think you’re right. Clojure is first and foremost a symbiote.

The term widely used is "hosted language"

Bare metal Clojure would be Clojure compiled with GraalVM

I'd also add cgrandes ClojureDart to the list.

I would generalize your observation as a logical consequence of Greenspun's tenth rule and conclude that we will eventually get a hosted lisp for any sufficiently relevant programing language.

I think you are right emotionally speaking. A lot of people, author of blogpost included, started with clojure so now they might consider most lisps clojur'y(enough).

However, the broader lisp community writes code very differently from typical clojure. Different idioms, slight syntax variations, completely different tooling and ecosystems.

While I can agree with you that for 'us' it certainly feels emotionally true. But if you go into other lisps scheme, racket etc you would notice huge differences. Differences which may feel even stronger than java vs c++ diff.

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