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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> I’ll try to learn LISP too, someday.

It's funny, as I could probably credit Dan with the reason I mostly spend time with Clojure and ClojureScript today. I think ClojureScript/Reagent/Om was mentioned really quickly when he did the "Hot Reloading / Time Traveling" talk back in 2014 sometime, which eventually led me to find Clojure which basically was made for making those things easy for the entire stack, not just frontend.

So thanks Dan for leading me to greener pastures, but a shame you still haven't taken the time to look into any lisp! Reagent+ClojureScript should be (relatively) familiar to you, as long as you get over the parenthesis-avoidance stage most of us go through :)

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Clojure is far from the whole truth when it comes to Lisp though.

Common Lisp doesn't have as many opinions about your code, includes several nice features that Clojure skipped, and isn't chained to the JVM.

> Clojure is far from the whole truth when it comes to Lisp though.

That's true for sure, and I'm sorry if my comment gave that impression, I'm not trying to say that Clojure is the only lisp, or even the best lisp! Just the one that fit me and my problems the best.

> and isn't chained to the JVM.

Neither is Clojure (the language), as it's available with JavaScript as a host (ClojureScript), LLVM (Jank) or even the Erlang VM (Clojerl). I'm sure there are more out there too, but the Clojure-JVM runtime isn't the only one available.

With that said, lots of people say Common Lisp is another good lisp, and been deployed in production for many decades, so I'm sure it's another great choice if anyone wanna get deeper into lisps. I personally haven't taken the time (yet!) to get to know it on any deeper level, so would be weird to recommend it before another lisp I know much better.

Not at all, just a bit sad that so many good ideas are lost chasing the latest hype.

Are we really calling Clojure the latest hype? It's not exactly new or even that popular. Or is everything that's not CL just hype?

Personally, I think it does a few things better than Common Lisp and many Clojurists came from Common Lisp.

In Lisp circles, I think it seems fair to call it the latest hype.

Or can you think of any other recent Lisps that have reached similar levels of popularity?

Of course, I'm not claiming Clojure is a subset of Common Lisp, it has a lot of good ideas. But so does Common Lisp.

clojure is almost 20 years old...

Lisp moves slowly, can you think of any more current contenders that have more than a handful of users?

yeah but the real GOAT here is elisp. True enlightenment comes when LISP ceases to be a language and instead becomes a turing-complete configuration file wherein you routinely spend 4+ hours coaxing a text editor into doing things that would have been trivial if you had just used a well-known single-purpose program that came with your gnu/linux distro anyways. It's a thing of beauty when it finally works, so much so that it's almost worth getting yelled at by your boss for taking way too long to complete simple tasks.

To paraphrase the late, great President John F Kennedy, "We choose to use emacs not because it is easy but because it is hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win!"

I was consistently tempted to give emacs a fair try but after now more than 20 years of vim it got more and more difficult to even imagine betraying it. Thankfully, now with neovim I can spend hours in my config files, and with fennel I can even lisp.

Haha, thanks! Yeah maybe now I'm on a sabbatical, I can actually play with a few things. I've also seen https://romanliutikov.com/blog/towards-react-server-componen... recently so kind of curious how that progresses.

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