Why I ever wrote Clojure

>I suspect this is the real reason Clojure was created, I bet Rich was just really bored.

I notice too that a noticeable number of people pick up Clojure because it's new and shiny. As a longtime Clojurian I find that attitude can be disappointing to run into, like when you realize a growing friendship will die because they're not serious about living in your city.

I don't claim to know the man but the reasons Rich wanted Clojure are quite concrete, well documented, and rational. Java programs of the time were a particularly heinous form of OOP; we should not be surprised that a clever programmer would grow a preference for a dynamic, functional-first style. He found lisp superior (in interactivity, expressiveness, yadda yadda) and wanted to use it professionally.

To work in lisp required delivering something indistinguishable from a JAR (or other mainstream proglang executable). He had the realization that without immutable data structures baked into the language he'd always be subject to Other People's State.

If you think about these points logically they lead pretty straightforwardly to creating a (pragmatically) functional, dynamic, hosted lisp.

> I suspect this is the real reason Clojure was created, I bet Rich was just really bored.

Well he spelled out the motivations in numerous early presentations so I don't think he'd take kindly to the implication they were BS.

I remember a funny quote along the lines of, he felt the concurrent software he'd already written in C++ and Java had required "He-Man" levels of perspiration to actually get correct.

> I suspect this is the real reason Clojure was created, I bet Rich was just really bored.

Rich has written about the history and motivation behind Clojure here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321

Such a low quality article. The whole comment thread is just going to be about the flamebait of "I bet Rich was just really bored". Instead, the author could have listed the reasons they actually "loved it, and by the end I hated it", which would have led to an interesting discussion.

Learning new things is great, sure!

But why speculate on Rich's motivations? He has spoken extensively on the subject. (Hint: It's not because he was bored.)