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The perfect language? I doubt that. It's probably quite decent.
The perfect language to expand your brain. In a world dominated by java, php, c++,... In my opinion yes, Clojure could the perfect language to continue learning concepts, at same level would be Haskell.
Clojure is still restricted/limited compared to Common Lisp.
If "expanding your brain" is really what we want to optimize, why not learn Haskell? Or for that matter, why not learn something even more strongly typed, like Agda or Idris? Or even a theorem prover like Lean? Most of the reasons the author presents would either be expanded in one of those languages, or is immaterial to the goal of maximizing learning. After reading the article I have no more reason to consider lear…
Programs aren't usually directly portable between languages primarily for that reason - the language designers optimise for a specific way they want their language to be used, then everyone else follows, and eventually you're going against an entire ecosystem if you want to do something different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
wish that were true, but i doubt it. scala, prolog and erlang are all higher on tiobe index.
I personally don't view Scala as a FP language, it's a FP/OO hybrid. It's not opinionated in that regard, and a lot of code in it is written in traditional OO style or a mix of the two. Erlang is another widely used functional language, but it's not very widely used outside the telecom niche. Clojure has the advantage of running on the JVM, and makes it easy to target a much wider range of domains.
Scala's problem is that they marketed it as "we're almost java - you can just sprinkle some functionalness on your code as you go and you'll be fine".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The perfect language to expand your brain. In a world dominated by java, php, c++,... In my opinion yes, Clojure could the perfect language to continue learning concepts, at same level would be Haskell.
It's also very pragmatic, and probably most used functional languages in the industry at this point.
Um no. Spec is not static typing, it does runtime checks. And core.typed is currently being rewritten and is not compatible with current version of Clojure.
If "expanding your brain" is really what we want to optimize, why not learn Haskell? Or for that matter, why not learn something even more strongly typed, like Agda or Idris? Or even a theorem prover like Lean? Most of the reasons the author presents would either be expanded in one of those languages, or is immaterial to the goal of maximizing learning. After reading the article I have no more reason to consider lear…
One huge difference is the workflow you have in Clojure. REPL driven development is an experience unique to Lisps. When you're working with Clojure, any code can be run in the context of the live app straight from the editor as you write it. This is an amazing experience and very mind expanding in what a development process can look like. Also, anybody who wants to try FP style programming, but isn't interested in st…
The perfect language? I doubt that. It's probably quite decent.
The perfect language to expand your brain. In a world dominated by java, php, c++,... In my opinion yes, Clojure could the perfect language to continue learning concepts, at same level would be Haskell.
I agree with Wadler that the best programming languages are discovered. First, the principles are revealed in a proof by a logician. Then about two or three decades later computer scientists "discover" the same principles. And another two or three decades after that mainstream programming languages reluctantly integrate the ideas.
This is all to say that computer languages are behind the curve. If your goal is to expand your brain you're better off digging into the fundamentals behind computer languages. Then you can see the flaws and trade-offs in all languages including Clojure, Haskell, C, Agda, Idris, Javascript, etc, etc, etc.
I've said the Clojure is a decent language. I don't think there is a perfect one. Not yet.
Clojure is the language where LISP clicked for me. Can't recommend it enough, it's got all of it - immutable datastructures, convenient data literals, simple and composable concurrency primitives, very thin interface to host VM. Just put enough effort to get beyond that "omg parenthesis" barrier and it will be a delight. It's like that Half-life joke: there are two kinds of people, those that finished Half-life many…
Having spent some time programming in Clojure, for the purpose of expanding my brain, I suspect a better Lisp to start with might be one of the classics - Racket, Common Lisp, etc... One of the reasons I gave up on Clojure was the lack of documentation of libraries, the bad debugging experience (those stack traces!) and the fact that there's no avoiding the JVM. They're all distractions to the learning (that was 2 ye…