Hacker News Reader

Comment by globalrev | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else think so? I'm using Clojure a lot and really like it.

But Lisp has been around for 50 years and never hit the mainstream so it seems there perhaps is something about it that doesn't fit with most programmers?

Also it only offers one form of concurrnecy and while I like it there is still much speculation and research in the area. Scala for example kind of builds on the whole Java-language and offers a more recognizable language for Java-developers and more opportunities to roll your own concurrency-mechanisms, or at least that's the impression I've gotten.

And then we have Haskell and Erlang.

View on HN

I think Clojure might succeed even without its great concurrency features - and by succeed I mean gaining a Porsche-like marketshare.

It has all the good Lisp stuff, but ditches all the historical Lisp cruft, actually has a little syntax. And because it runs on the JVM, it's stable, fast, debuggable, has a wealth of libraries and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

And there's already a (beta) book: http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure

Clojure is clean and lean while Scala is heavy weight. I'm learning them side by side but enjoying Clojure way more, especially the pragmatism of feature decisions.

Clojure just might become a popular lisp. :-)

In terms of Scala, it's built on top of the JVM (as is Clojure) and so it's underlying model is the same -- Java threads mapped to OS threads. Scala does give people a variety of syntactic constructs.

Is this due to something inherent with Lisp? This argument also works for each aspect of Lisp that's been borrowed by other languages:

  (format t "~{~A has been around for ~D years so it seems there perhaps is something about it that doesn't fit with most programmers?~^ ~}"
          '("Structured programming" 10
            "Lexical scoping" 20
            "GC" 30
            "Closures" 40))

The last increment of power that makes Python into a Lisp seems pretty small in comparison.

Clojure does fix one of the last things holding it back: it removed "Lisp" from the name, and added a trendy "J".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com