Why I am excited about Clojure • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#171

Post by tomp » Tue, May 06, 2014, 11:11 AM UTC

patrickmay wrote: post #123

tomp wrote: post #71

> With Clojure your editor (be it Vim, Emacs, Light Table...) is permanently connected to a live REPL. You continually develop, test and modify functions with subsecond feedback. Continuously. Can anyone explain or point me in a direction where I can learn how the above functionality is actually used and useful? I keep hearing about live-editing/hot-reloading, and in theory I believe it must be very useful, but I can…

> What kind of programs can work like that? Continuously running programs, like web servers/GUI programs? I use Common Lisp and Hunchentoot to build RESTful web applications. I can connect to the Lisp image running on the server using Swank from Emacs on my development box. If there is a bug, I can change the function, recompile it, and test the change with curl, without rebooting the server or reloading the app. The…

What do you do then, after successfully fixing the bug? Are the changes automatically reflected in files, or do you need to manually perform the same change locally and commit it, so that it's there when the server is next redeployed?

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#172

Post by tomp » Tue, May 06, 2014, 11:13 AM UTC

technomancy wrote: post #157

tomp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julia [1] has 3 and 5, and almost 1 (it has very few built-in syntax sugars and a uniform way of invoking macros). It's targeted at scientists, so 4 is not an option, as infix syntax is a hard requirement for mathematics. [1] http://julialang.org/ Edit: Elixir [2] is homoiconic as well, with even more uniform syntax (though it doesn't have special matrix syntax). [2] http://elixir-lang.org/

Elixir is not homoiconic. They used to claim that based on a very unusual definition of homoiconicity, but they have removed those claims from their materials.

But Julia is, or not? If yes, why? (The only difference, as far as I can see, is that Julia AST is considerably simpler than Elixir's (a Julia struct with 3 fields, only two of which need to be present: head and args). Though admittedly, that counts a lot.

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#173

Post by aaronem » Tue, May 06, 2014, 1:43 PM UTC

lemming wrote: post #160

aaronem wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who has lately been studying Common Lisp, I'm not quite sure how I feel about Clojure; I like that it's hosted on the JVM, but I don't like the apparent lack of a debugger, which to my mind is a sine qua non of Lisp development. I haven't seen much in the way of progress on that front, either, but it's been a few months since I last looked into it; is there any sign that that handicap is likely to…

I'm the author of Cursive, a Clojure IDE based on IntelliJ. Cursive currently has a fairly minimal and occasionally frustrating debugger that I'm planning to improve soon. That said, I use it all the time and it works pretty well. It's really nice to be able to debug a REPL session. Currently breakpoints and stepping work well, and expression evaluation somewhat works but is pretty quirky. Types and names are all cur…

Well, I'm glad to see that you at least appear to be headed in more or less the right direction. I'm not about to invest $100 in Clojure at this early stage of the language's development, but I'll be interested to see how the tooling continues to progress.