51–60 of 226 posts
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…
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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…
Why not Common Lisp or Scheme?
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…
Clojure default of immutable hash maps and vectors was really bold. They had to innovate by giving a twist to Bagwell's great research on data-structures, and they managed to build what in my opinion are the first set of general data-structures suitable of representing traditional hierarchical object-tree data-models immutably, at the scale of large interactive software.
Without these, the single-atom architecture that now is popular as ever with Redux, Elm, etc. would not be possible. The flourishing of functional programming for interactive software that followed shows to me that the biggest impediment before was not the lack of functional ways of expressing interactions (the Haskell people have devoted a lot of notable effort in the FRP camp). Instead, just having efficient data-structures to write persistent document models, escaping the rigidity of lists and rb-trees, allows you to write big interactive sofware in a functional manner even with the most dumb abstractions (which is a good thing, KISS!) and even stupid language (JavaScript!).
This has inspired me to work on a generic implementation in C++, which also has experimental Python and Guile bindings: https://sinusoid.es/immer/ https://github.com/arximboldi/immer/
In the past I also did some other work on bringing Clojure Transducers to C++ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vohGJjGxtJQ&t=1614s) but I know consider it a much less important effort---without the data-structures the other parts of Clojure feel almost like just sugar.
EDIT1 -- Sorry for the shameless plug ;)
EDIT2 -- Grammar
After the initial hurdle of getting used to a Lisp I found the language very liberating. I definitely approach problems very differently than I did prior to learning Clojure, even when flipping back to JavaScript land. I find my approach is vastly different that it was before. The best way to describe my way of thinking is that I'm very "data first" now.
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…
As for type systems increasing complexity I think that depends on the application. As a beginner to Clojure I would pass unstructured data around all over the place and then have the mental overhead of trying to remember the structure or fix it all at runtime.
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…
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…
I'm reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs right now and everything is clicking. I'm looking forward to going back to Clojure after I get through more of SICP.