How things change.
Rich Hickey is a genius. A nice man. A practical man. A modest man. A role model for our industry.
Rich Hickey is a genius. A nice man. A practical man. A modest man. A role model for our industry.
In my opinion he has made some questionable decisions with Clojure.
- Gratuitous use of [] in some forms; mainly defn and let. Why break the homonicity so often for no real benefit?
- Comment strings appearing before argument lists in functions. I would like to see the entire protocol, name and args, before reading the docstring which may refer to the args.
- List? predicate... (list? '(1)) => true (list? '(1 2)) => false ...
- Multi arity functon, the main justification in the documentation is due to JVM limitations, JVM limitations like these can be hidden by the hidden by the guest language http://clojure-doc.org/articles/language/functions.html#mult...
These are just my superficial opinions of Clojure, I am still very much at the beginning of my journey in learning the language.
I don't think you understand what homoiconicity means.
Let me see if I can elaborate on what I think you mean. Homoiconic can be interpreted as meaning that the programs structure is similar to it's internal representation and so then it can be argued that an argument list is implemented as a vector and so should be represented as such.
But I would suggestion that this is an implementation detail and would hazard that many Lisp implementation might share this implementation strategy. I suppose I should have described it as something along the lines of needlessly breaking with Lisp syntax traditions.
As an aside the reader macros themselves are not the problem as lists are not a one size fits all data structure within current computing so there is a need for vectors and hash maps etc.
[] is an array data type, () is a list. Code and data are still the same.
Omitting the parentheses inside those square brackets, however, was an even worse decision wrt editability. When you can't edit a sequence of syntactically homogenous items by simple s-expression manipulations, your Lisp's design is defective.
The other thing with the docstring, of course, is that Rich made the decision to only have one docstring on an overloaded function. The docstring/arg order falls straight out of that. OTOH if you've read the docs for "map" recently you may be wondering if that was such a smart decision. For better or for worse, muti-arity overloading that doesn't just do partial application is a big part of modern Clojure.
"- Comment strings appearing before argument lists in
functions. I would like to see the entire protocol,
name and args, before reading the docstring which may
refer to the args."
(defn ^number min
"Returns the least of the nums."
([x] x)
([x y] (cljs.core/min x y))
([x y & more]
(reduce min (cljs.core/min x y) more)))
Uh? That doesn't seem to be the case on http://tryclj.com/ or according to http://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/list_q .
> (type `(1))
clojure.lang.PersistentList
> (type `(1 2))
clojure.lang.Cons
> (list? `(1 2))
false