On Jun 28, 9:14 pm, Michael Richter <ttmrich...@gmail.com> wrote: > Ah. The Clojure community has already started down the road to Common > Lisp-style, smugness-generated obscurity and disdain. Bravo! Well-played!
Not at all. Nothing would make me happier than "Clojure for Dummies" and Wrox Professional Clojure books on the shelves of every Barnes & Noble programming section. It's pained me to watch Python and Ruby far outpace the growth of any functional language in the last ten years. I'd love to stop looking for excuses to sneak things like Clojure under the radar at work and actually have a management mandate to use them. The fact remains though that Clojure trades in heavy concepts. The syntax alone will simply be a non-starter for at least half the potential audience. Toss in concurrency and non-mutability and ubiquitous recursion which are tricky concepts no matter how cleanly exposed in the language. As many posters have said in this thread, you really do have to have a decent grasp on Java to do real work in Clojure so you're already on the hook for two languages, one of which is a baroque and provincial monster. Like any engineering problem, language design is about tradeoffs. Obviously Rich has worked hard to make Clojure as approachable as possible but you can't simultaneously emphasize tackling the really hard problems in software engineering and making CRUDDY webapps as painless as possible for the average programmer. Believe that Lisp, perhaps this time in the guise of Clojure, will conquer the world some day if you wish. There was a time when I wanted to think so too. As it is, I'd be happy if Clojure becomes acceptable enough for "hard problem" work that I'm not forced to use a soft fuzzy tool like Java or Python instead. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
