Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't Clojure already support all of those features ?

Eg.

> transducer-first design, laziness either eliminated or opt-in

You can write your code using transducers or opt-in for laziness in Clojure now. So it's a matter of choice of tools, rather than a feature of the language.

> protocols everywhere as much as practically possible (performance)

Again, it's a choice made by the programmer, the language already allows you to have protocols everywhere. It's also how Clojure is implemented under the hood.

-> first-class data structures/types are also CRDT data types, where practical (correctness and performance)

Most of the programs I worked on, did not require CRDT. I'm inclined to choose a library for this.

> first-class maps, vectors, arrays, sets, counters, and more

Isn't this the case already ? If Clojure's native data structures are not enough, there's the ocean of Java options..

Which leads to a very interesting question:

How should the 'real' AGI respond to your request ?

> first-class maps, vectors, arrays, sets, counters, and more

That's my mistake; this line was intended to be a sub-bullet point of the previous line regarding CRDTs.

> the language already allows you to have protocols everywhere

The core data structures, for example, are not based on protocols; they are implemented in pure Java. One reason is that the 1.0 version of the language lacked protocols. All that being said, it remains an open question what the full implications of the protocol-first idea are.

> You can write your code using transducers or opt in for laziness in Clojure now. So it's a matter of choice of tools, rather than a feature of the language.

You 100% can. Unfortunately, many people don't. The first thing people learn is (map inc [1 2 3]), which produces a lazy sequence. Clojure would never change this behavior, as the authors value backward compatibility almost above everything else, and rightly so. A transducer-first approach would be a world where (map inc [1 2 3]) produces the vector [2 3 4] by default, for example.

This was mentioned by Rich Hickey himself in his "A History of Clojure" paper:

https://clojure.org/about/history https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321

(from paper) > "Clojure is an exercise in tool building and nothing more. I do wish I had thought of some things in a different order, especially transducers. I also wish I had thought of protocols sooner, so that more of Clojure’s abstractions could have been built atop them rather than Java interfaces."

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