Hi all. I've been looking at Clojure for the past month, having had a previous look at it a couple of years ago and then moved on to other things only to return to it now.
Over the past decade I have looked at many languages and many ways of doing things. People may say this language or that language is "general purpose", but the fact remains that languages have their niches in which they excel and beyond which it'd be foolish to venture. Clojure should not attempt be a "mass success" language or worry about its Tiobe index ranking. Clojure, the way I see it, is most suitable for the advanced independent developer. It is a language in the image of its creator, Rich Hickey. It's not a language for the factory hen. It won't become the next Java. Java already fills that niche, and despite what some may say, I don't see it going away anytime soon. I don't feel Clojure needs to "grow" - in terms of size of language. In fact it would worry me enormously if Clojure's path is to "grow" in size. It is fundamentally unsuited for that. If anything I wish for it to shrink even further and further. A Rich Hickey's quote comes to mind: • (paraphrased) "Most Clojure programmers go through an arc. First they think “eww, Java” and try to hide all the Java. Then they think “ooh, Java” and realize that Clojure is a powerful way to write Java code" and "As I've said in my talks, most Clojure users go from "eww, Java libs" to "ooh, Java libs", leveraging the fact there there is already a lib for almost anything they need to do. And using the lib is completely transparent, idiomatic and wrapper free." - Google verbatim for sources. Whereas when Steve Yegge writes: "which means that everyone (including me!) who is porting Java code to Clojure (which, by golly, is a good way to get a lot of people using Clojure) is stuck having to rework the code semantically rather than just doing the simplest possible straight port. The more they have to do this, the more you're going to shake users off the tree." all I could think on reading this is "horror, horror, oh God, horror!!!; he really doesn't get it". First, he shouldn't be porting Java code to clojure, Second, Clojure IS fundamentally different from Java, and third, such said users who don't want to touch Java should not touch Clojure. Clojure shouldn't worry about growing; java already has innumerable libs. Clojure, imho, should continue its - what I would dub - "middleware begone!" path, in which it'd provide an end-to-end, down- to-the-metal comprehensible system that an individual developer can get his head round and know exactly what's happening with his code and its environment here and everywhere. I could write more, but I have to run. Regards. J. -- 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
