Clojure is cool
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Clojure is cool
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Re: Clojure is cool
#2Similarly, I would whole heartedly recommend the Common Lisp macro system (having myself discovering how to use it a few days back). The power it gives to the programmer is unmatched by any other system I have ever used (except maybe forth)
Re: Clojure is cool
#3nil is not. nil punning is a band-aid. Otherwise, I love the lang.
Re: Clojure is cool
#4Similarly, I would whole heartedly recommend the Common Lisp macro system (having myself discovering how to use it a few days back). The power it gives to the programmer is unmatched by any other system I have ever used (except maybe forth)
The Clojure macro system is very similar to the Common Lisp one, arguably with some improvements- The Lisp languages in the Scheme/Racket family, on the other hand, have a different (more safety-oriented) approach to macros.
Re: Clojure is cool
#5nil is not. nil punning is a band-aid. Otherwise, I love the lang.
Yeah, I think many Clojurians would mildly agree some changes to how nil is handled would be nice... but this is such a fundamental behavior that it's very hard to justify modifying the language at this point for just a minor benefit.
Re: Clojure is cool
#6So... awful and bloated Java code (with javadocs, why?!) compared to short counter-examples from Clojure.
IMHO quite terrible way to compare the two…
Re: Clojure is cool
#7nil is not. nil punning is a band-aid. Otherwise, I love the lang.
On the contrary, nil punning seems exceptionally well suited to a dynamic language. In general, I'm only burned by nil propagating into Java, almost all Clojure code seems to handle nil appropriately.
I'm unsure of a good way to represent optionality in a dynamic language without a static type system. Or rather, doing so with the tools available -- core.match vs real pattern matching -- seems rather un-ergonomic.
I'm curious about your thoughts of what would be better.
Re: Clojure is cool
#8Anyone who writes Lisp without taking a moment to add a docstring to every definition would never get a job offer from me. (Not to mention comments as appropriate.)
Re: Clojure is cool
#9LISPs seem to me the best candidates for an alternative to the traditional text editor. I could imagine a mind-map sort of view which would allow you to expand and collapse sub-trees etc. Does anything like this exist? To me, that would be reason to experiment with something like Clojure.
Re: Clojure is cool
#10This has a great explanation of the clojure REPL. I think a lot of people hear about the REPL and think, oh my language has a REPL too, no big deal.
Maybe the clojure REPL should be renamed to something else to differentiate it from other language REPLs