Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python

For any engineering work, including software engineering you choose the best tool for the job. In D you can have the high performance tool capable of bit shifting, string processing, array manipulation (to name a few) and from scripts to highly concurrent low-latency applications (see presentation in the ref [3] above by Prof. Shah from Yale).

It's a shame that the proper typed programming language are being ignored just because of programmers' locally sub-optimal preferences and limited exposure. The productivity increased using typical scripting languages including Python is diminishing everyday with the proliferation of IntelliSense, auto-complete and AI assisted coding.

For production codes, the scripting language based systems if they ever made it to production (mostly do e.g AirBNB, Twitter, Shopify, Github, etc) will be a maintenance headache and user nightmare, if the supports are not great and not unicorn start-ups. The last thing you want is that your saved eclaim form that you spent many hours preparing totally dissapeared since the system cannot recall the saved version. Granted this can be because of many reasons, but most of the problematic production systems are mostly written in scripting languages including Python because these are the only language the programmers know and familiar with. Adding to the insults are the readily available so called "battery included" libraries are convenients but ironically written in other compiled but unsafe system language in C/C++.

I've been programming for decades. I've used dozens of different, at times enormously esoteric languages. At one point I built ERPs in a language where operators were abbreviated Russian terms. After just a few years of using Lisp dialects I am absolutely convinced - there's no simpler and more readable syntax than of Lisp's. Anyone who doesn't see that, in my eyes just not made the distinction between familiarity and simplicity.

They're measuring how quickly their eyes can parse something they've already seen a thousand times, and calling that readability. But readability isn't recognition speed - it's the cognitive distance between the code and the computation it describes. And on that measure, Lisp is essentially lossless. There's no syntactic residue. No ceremony the language demands for its own sake. What you write is the structure of the thing, all the way down.

"You get used to it. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead..." I don't look at Matrix feeling puzzled anymore. I see the truth.

People who bounce off the parentheses are reacting to something real: it doesn't look like what they already know. But that's not the language failing them. That's just the last bit of the old syntax dying. Give it a few months of structural editing and a proper REPL workflow, and you won't see parentheses anymore - you'll see shape. You'll see depth. And going back to anything else will feel like someone handed you a map drawn in crayon and called it a feature.

There's some historical cruft (especially the memory model), but picking the JVM as a target is a great decision (especially with Graal offering even more options).

I thought that too before I learned Clojure, now I find them equally readable.