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Comment by stormcrowsx | Hacker News Reader

Scala and Clojure are built for two different purposes, both were made with different goals and problems in mind. This type of comparison is the same as comparing two different shop tools. On one hand you have a scrollsaw and on the other you have a tabletop saw. They are for two different purposes, and you won't find many people comparing the two. Programmers need to learn this, use a language for what its good with.

Language designers should also keep it in mind when describing their language. "I made this language with these problems in mind, and these goals in mind".

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He actually touched on this towards the end of the presentation. To simplify, he states that Clojure is about data and Scala is about types. When accommodating dynamic data, it's easier to use Clojure because of the ubiquity of Maps as the primary data type and the nice handling if Null values via Clojure's Nil type. In Scala, dynamic data is dealt with using the Option Monad, and this adds layers of complication to your code.

Yeah but by and whole the talk was more about cons of Scala than pros. If your going to describe a language in terms of another you should list what both are good and bad for. It was a very biased talk that makes it sound like Clojure fixes just about everything, in reality Clojure works well in a band of problems that Scala is not well suited for.

This talk is actually better than most but in general when people compare two languages they bash one and praise the other excessively. I'd like to see an end to that trend and for speakers to start saying what a tool is meant for and what its not meant for.

Very true that this talk did seem to be bias to Clojure. As and Scala user myself, I think his critique of Scala was fair.

Scala and Clojure are built for two different purposes

The point of this talk is to make light of the fact that Scala is now being used for purposes to which it was not originally intended. These new uses are much more in line with Clojure's intended uses. This makes it appropriate to compare them.

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