Clojure adds AOT compilation | Hacker News Reader

Clojure adds AOT compilation

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37 pointscstejerean17 comments

This is great news.

I've finished reading the fist draft of the Pragmatic Programmers new book on Clojure and I can't wait until they release another draft. The first draft only contains about half the chapters.

Glad to hear that you liked the book. I am looking forward to getting the beta book myself, but have three books on my table right now. Hopefully soon.

If one were to read only this site, one would have the feeling that Clojure were taking over the programming language world. Clojure is the skinny jeans of the programming world - it may be cool right now, but in 5 years you'll be feeling slightly ashamed that you jumped on the fashion train.

There are a lot of people who would like to use Lisp if only some variant became sufficiently practical (by which I mean: ran on enough platforms, had enough libraries, and grew a big enough community around itself).

If Clojure turns out to be that Lisp I don't think anyone will need to feel ashamed.

I jumped on ruby at the end of 2003. Wasn't that bad a choice either. Clojure seems a nice next thing to learn.

Do you care to say why you think that?

There haven't been too many people who have really had bad things to say about Clojure once they've accepted the fact that it targets the JVM.

I know I used to be one of those guys who reflexively went "Java? GROSS!", but then I actually took a look at the language and think that it's one of the better thought out languages to emerge in the past few years.

[Edit: Sorry, my tone seemed a little confrontational here - I'm genuinely curious as to what you perceive the problems with Clojure to be? So far I haven't heard many negatives about it and I'm curious to hear what people think those negatives are. So far, the only real "negative" I've heard is that Clojure is not multi-paradigm in the way CL is.]

It does not have to have a problem to be a fad. Programming languages all require a big time investment in learning them - so those that exist tend to stay around. People only change languages when there are very clear benefits. Clojure seems to have pulled up to the same level as other much older and better known programming languages - there are no benefits (at the moment) to it that would make the mass of programmers switch to it.

Ruby is a good language, but it only became popular when it offered a clear benefit.

For a language to enter the mainstream and stay in the mainstream, it has to do a lot more than just not be bad. It has to be better than others in some way.

(By the way, being a functional language does not make it better, it makes it worse, since most programmers have trouble grasping functional concepts)

At the moment, clojure may not have any negatives, but it does not have any strong positives, so I don't see why it would catch on.

Suppose your arguments are true. Here's why clojure is destined to be big.

Clear benefit: you have Java at your disposal, while being "new and cool." From a library standpoint it is Java + extras.

Functional does not make it better: if there are two types of people, one that prefers functional, one imperative, go ahead! Let the functional use clj, the imperative use java. Now you can compile to .class and use either paradigm!

I don't code lisp regularly, but I'm convinced clojure is the NBT and so I'm preparing to jump ship after it matures :D

Should we take a bet on that? I say that with no extra framework coming up that utilizes clojure, clojure will forever remain a small niche product.

Frameworks are big in Java-land because you need an enormous amount of scaffolding to make any non-trivial application work. That's less true in other languages. Libraries and interoperability with other languages are more important, and where LISP has traditionally suffered. Clojure has a lot of potential, but there are a lot of languages poised in the wings right now, all jockeying to be the next big thing. F# for example is functional (it's descended from OCaml) and has full access to the .NET libraries, which are as comprehensive as Java's, and has the backing of a major vendor. Now if Sun were to pick up Clojure and make it the official functional language on the Java platform, that would be something.

> Should we take a bet on that? I say that with no extra framework coming up that utilizes clojure, clojure will forever remain a small niche product.

I'm not sure how Clojure will play out but remember it's only a few years old. You could have said the same thing about Ruby in 1997.

Clojure's first birthday was just a few weeks ago.

I take your bet.

Alright, find me in a few years and claim the reward.

Can you really compile Clojure into .class files? I was wondering that the other day, and the conclusion that I reached was that it doesn't work that way.

Yes you can: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/58e3f8e5dfb876c9

(It's new!)

Ruby is not a good language though. It's not consistent, it's not lexically scoped, it's slow and it's std library is immature.

There are similar arguments aginst Python, but less so.

As far as strong benefits of clojure: concurrency, it's lisp, it has libraries, it interoperates with Java.

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