Ask HN: Why do Haskellers discourage FP newbies from learning Clojure?

8 points·Toshio··3 comments

I have noticed this pattern in IRC discussions on #haskell. Chime in as to why Haskellers have a low opinion of Clojure.

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There is a philosophical gap that is independent of typing. Clojure encourages functional programming, but does not require it. It is also littered with a lot of not perhaps arbitrary but definitely replaceable syntactic sugar geared towards short, clean and practical code. Haskell on the other hand is like an evolving paper on how to implement the world using typed functional programming. If two people figure out the same idea, in Haskell they will much more likely end up using the same syntax up to naming. It is the canonical language for concepts.

It could just be biased because you're asking about Clojure in a Haskell room. It may not be that haskellers have a low opinion of Clojure so much as they have a higher opinion of Haskell.

I assume you've asked them, but what did they say?

My guess: Haskell has a very strong academic background. I know it's very popular in the language design community, I mean, it's basically lambda calculus with a very advanced type system, and academic language designers love type systems. Clojure is dynamically typed and is has all the messy compromises of a pragmatic language -- that's my guess.

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