Why I am excited about Clojure

Post by DigitalJack » Mon, May 05, 2014, 8:50 PM UTC

Morgawr wrote: post #122

DigitalJack wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit to still not understanding what goes on with function definitions in clojure, but this idea of just making a micro change in clojure and evaling that and seeing the real time effects never seems to pan out for me. I do lots of small functions that build on each other. If I make a change to one of the base functions, the higher functions seem to hold a reference to the old definition and I end up having to re-…

>And documentation in clojure code in general is very poor. People think their code is self documenting. It is not. Clojure functions and macros have docstrings you can query with the "doc" function. Honestly I've started keeping a repl open all time like I used to do in C with a terminal + man, so I can use (doc whatever) or (source whatever) to see the documentation + implementation details of most of the functions…

Post by pjmlp » Mon, May 05, 2014, 10:32 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #152

pjmlp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work done at Xerox PARC with Smalltalk and Interlisp was great. Imagine having a REPL to your complete OS, not the just the basic CLI that most systems have. There are a few videos of those days showing up the systems.

+1 I still think fondly of the InterLisp environment on the Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine my company bought me in 1982. You can find emulators for InterLisp, but the experience is not the same.

Post by dllthomas » Mon, May 05, 2014, 10:42 PM UTC

aaron-lebo wrote: post #130

yogsototh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of little secret of Clojure is that you almost never use Java based library. Because it forces you not to use idiomatic Clojure. So, most library you'll use in Clojure are in fact Clojure made. From this point of view of number of libraries, Haskell and Clojure are in fact at the same level. I was sold in part by the JVM argument. But in reality, in practice, I found it to be more a burden than a delight. First,…

> One of little secret of Clojure is that you almost never use Java based library. Because it forces you not to use idiomatic Clojure. So, most library you'll use in Clojure are in fact Clojure made. From this point of view of number of libraries, Haskell and Clojure are in fact at the same level. This isn't really true. Yes, directly using a Java library forces you to use Clojure that is not idiomatic but 1) this is…

Post by technomancy » Tue, May 06, 2014, 12:14 AM UTC

tomp wrote: post #68

Expez wrote: post #50

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The benefits of lisp 'syntax' are legion, to the point that I've come to feel that your position is unprofessional. Why wouldn't you try to get passed something as superficial as syntax, in order to better _make_ stuff? 1) Easier to learn and remember syntax for polyglots. No more Googling, shit like "what was the syntax for try-with-resources or the new multi-catch feature in java"? 2) The language tooling is so muc…

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/

Post by mjs2600 » Tue, May 06, 2014, 12:38 AM UTC

astine wrote: post #34

undershirt wrote: post #27

I'm more excited about ClojureScript because it runs in the browser as JS, of course. My mind is kind of blown that Go-routines were added to the language as a library (core.async). And so was logic programming (core.logic), optional typing (core.typed), and pattern matching (core.match).

That's the neat thing about Lisp-style macros. You have to sacrifice a little bit of the syntactical sugar that you are used to in most languages, but in return you have the ability to add almost any possible construct to the language natively. It makes it much easier to extend the language as you don't need to hack an interpreter written in C or Java. Half of the core language is already written in macros.

  quote do
    1 + 1
  end

  {:+, [context: Elixir, import: Kernel], [1, 1]}