Is it insane to suggest that perhaps clojure should work with scala such that we can write both languages in the same file?
Use scala to do you strongly typed work and things where you are really concerned that auto-promotion. Let the language made for helping a programmer lots of information about his/her code (and perhaps overspecify the solution a gross amount) be used where that is necessary. Look, annotating shit in a clojure file to ensure you don't have a crapload of boxing and inference going in is a large PITA. So in areas where you know you are going to need to do lots of things like that, why wouldn't you use scala? Specifying the type of everything going on is obviously, for a lot of cases, grossly overspecifying the problem. But what if we could just write scala code in a clojure file or vice versa? It seems that you would bypass a lot of the odder 'improvements' to clojure for expert users and just be better off. Obviously one of the answers is 'if you think it is a good idea then you do it' and I don't have the time. But I know this: 1. Meta programming is an insanely powerful tool for compressing code. 2. Type inference is insanely powerful for producing programs that do 'exactly' what the programming said they should. 3. Clojure-in-java is fast and thus clojure-in-scala would be fast, no language additions required. And probably 30-50% shorter but perhaps not more than that. 4. Type annotations are as bad as C programming in terms of verbosity and to write fast code you need them. A little inference would make a large difference. Types in a lisp-like language suck. There isn't a way around it. Lets use a powerful type-inference tool where appropriate and ditch them completely where it is inappropriate. You want a hover-over or tooltip to tell you what type something is producing or taking (or to guarantee details about what you are doing)? Use scala. You want to write extremely compressed code in a way that is very easy to change and specifies as little of the answer to the problem as possible (thus giving a lot of leeway for implementation and extension)? Use clojure. Chris -- 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
