Clojure will affect the way you think about programming

Are we doing opinion threads now? Okay. I can do one too!

I do like working with clojure. It's my favorite dynamically typed programming language by an easy margin.

It's basically everything that was a good idea in Python and Ruby brought under the unifying role of a Lisp syntax, with a good Java FFI. This makes it slightly harder to learn (it's very difficult to learn Clojure if you don't at least know Java).

It has a very clean syntax for the most part. Parenthesis handling does need some automation (basically everyone copied paredit) but has the nice property that refactoring is a breeze and extremely predictable.

Except for rogue agents like me and a few others, very few programmers go crazy with defmacro, which makes Clojure often a lot more orderly and understandable than lots of Common Lisp code.

I've run a shop with 6 clojure developers collaborating with engineers in both mobile and web space, and in many places Clojure was such a delight that cljs began to creep into the web frontends. In many cases the mobile devs contributed API endpoint handlers to the codebase and they said in general it was easy to work with (although folks sometimes had problems with more complex map types; often because of leftover code from the Bad Old Days when :symbol-a and :symbol_a both got introduced into our codebase because of bugs in AWS bindings choking on -'s).

Clojure, like many dynamic languages, is ultimately limited by its lack of a type system. At some point systems become challenging to refactor. To combat this, a lot of discipline about testing and builds needs to happen.

I built a business around Clojure, sold it to a bank, and made lots of money and friends along the way (and just yesterday the bank announced they have decided to kill it because they don't like it, but that's got little to do with clojure and everything to do with ). We did stuff that VCs flat out claimed was impossible, to my face.

I'm much more interested in other languages now, but that's not because I think Clojure is bad. It's because I think that my development as a software engineer requires I put Clojure down for a few years and work with other concepts.

> So it's asking if Clojure is better at it than other languages/paradigms.

My argument was that there are such a wide variety of languages/frameworks/paradigms that it makes no sense to make such a claim.

Someone from a functional background ( lets say you know scheme or ML ) would get more from learning an OO language than from learning clojure. He'd learn more from learning assembly and seeing how data moves in and out of registers than from learning clojure.

Programming is such a wide topic. We get this posts all the time. Go will expand your mind more than anything or ruby will or F# or any other flavor of the day or even python.

It all depends on who you are and what you know.

In other words "Clojure - the perfect language to expand your brain?" is a silly assertion. There is no "perfect language" because everyone's brains are different because we all come with different backgrounds and expertise.

But that's just my opinion.

This is true, if you're a java/jvm person, this is a huge upside, even if you aren't, once you see just how much code has been written in java, you'll probably come to appreciate the pragmatism.

When I learned clojure two years ago, I didn't have any experience with java or the jvm, so I had to sort of learn where the boundary was.

After that initial hurdle however, I now use java interop quite a bit.

Scheme is better. It's more powerful and far smaller.

A lot of projects are done for the heck of it. Nothing wrong with that.

Native libraries is a good reason. Particularly GUI libraries.

I imagine Swift would be a decent target for a lisp, for app development.

GUI is a major missing area in clojure. There are some good efforts there, Seesaw targeting Swing, and fn-fx targeting JavaFX.