Hacker News Reader

False and nil being two distinct values isn't Clojure's fault though. Or not directly. There are a bunch of trade offs that Clojure makes to have very direct interop with its host languages.

View on HN

Clojure sits on the JVM. Why can't false be false and nil be NULL?

I know of no other JVM-based lisp system which makes this "tradeoff". Indeed Kawa, which is rather faster than Clojure in my experience, does not.

Clojure's nil on the JVM and Java's null are the same value. Are we misunderstanding each other, or am I missing something?

I think we're talking past each other. Clearly in Clojure nil and false are different as NULL and false are different in Java. But in Clojure, they're both falsey, a really stupid design decision: but in Java they are NOT both falsey, only false is.

Nope, it's a great design decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com