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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

The usual argument for Clojure is that it allows for short and succinct code; but actually, Scala code is about 10% shorter: its type system is good enough so that you can do almost anything with it in a similar elegant and short fashion as in Clojure.

Programming in Clojure I miss the following features from Scala most:

a) Pattern matching

b) Having machine-checked documentation (aka type system), traits.

c) A proper documentation generation tool. The Clojure one doesn't do protocols properly, although protocols are the only real way in Clojure to have something akin' to interfaces and Scala traits.

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Not trying to sell you anything, just trying to help you find some things you've been missing:

a) https://github.com/clojure/core.match

b1) https://github.com/clojure/core.typed

b2) I agree that Clojure's facilities for mixins is under-utilized and that it lacks a proper facility for delegation (ie implicit conversions in Scala), but see (doc extend) for how awesome "traits as data" can be. Here's an example: https://github.com/stuartsierra/clojure.walk2/blob/2250e04c7...

c1) I hate generated documentation, but I understand why it's necessary for Scala. When I did some scala programming, I was so pleased with ScalaDoc, since it really helps you navigate that complex scala.collections hierarchy. Feels like having a pretty decent substitute to a good IDE. In Clojure, I don't feel the need nearly as much... Also, I quite like reflective documentation with the doc macro.

c2) Already covered interfaces/traits in b2

For a and b you should check our core.match [1] and core.typed [2]. One of the best parts of using lisps is that things that are features of other languages can be implemented as libraries. Not to say Scala probably isn't great too, but I haven't ever really used it.

[1] https://github.com/clojure/core.match

[2] https://github.com/clojure/core.typed

IIRC Clojure itself is a library.

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