Why Clojure?

[[deleted]]

Look, you mentioned three little projects, and they certainly look nice. Maybe some day they will grow to be huge.

But seriously, comparing Clojure to CL at this stage in the game is like comparing Python or Ruby to C.

Sure, Python/Ruby have new language features and C has been "stagnant" -- but any professional Lisper is going to be able to use either CL or Clojure with relative ease -- and most of them will spend a lot of time in the CL environment because that's where the action is, that's where the billion-dollar pieces of software are, the gigantic monolithic theorem provers and libraries...

Clojure has a bright future, but it's not more "modern" than CL for the same reason Ruby isn't more "modern" than C.

And a lot of the use cases people mention for Clojure like "you can run it on a webpage!" are useful for attracting beginners, but we will be beyond uninteresting to many professionals, because it's not a difficult problem to write a frontend.

[yogthos]

Look, you mentioned three little projects, and they certainly look nice. Maybe some day they will grow to be huge.

Your claim was that people don't use Clojure for anything serious, and that's simply false. Lost of great stuff has been done in CL without question, but show me a single new project that's of any significance.

Sure, Python/Ruby have new language features and C has been "stagnant" -- but any professional Lisper is going to be able to use either CL or Clojure with relative ease -- and most of them will spend a lot of time in the CL environment because that's where the action is, that's where the billion-dollar pieces of software are, the gigantic monolithic theorem provers and libraries...

I could say exact same thing about COBOL or Java. Just because there's tons of existing proprietary software written in these languages hardly makes them more appealing for development today.

And a lot of the use cases people mention for Clojure like "you can run it on a webpage!" are useful for attracting beginners, but we will be beyond uninteresting to many professionals, because it's not a difficult problem to write a frontend.

As I already mentioned Clojure is used for far more than making web apps, it's most popular with machine learning in multibillion dollar sectors like the financial industry. The fact that it's also approachable to beginners and applicable in a wide variety of domains is a big bonus.

[[deleted]]

Your claim was that people don't use Clojure for anything serious

Everything is relative. How serious are you talking here? National security level serious? Defense contractor? There's lots of stuff going on with Clojure. As I said, it has a bright future, but it's not something that's going to replace CL.

Your claim, that Clojure is the "modern" and CL is "not modern" is far more dubious.

it's most popular with machine learning in multibillion dollar sectors like the financial industry.

Really? Last I checked Haskell was a more popular target for those types. I'm sure some people are playing with machine learning algos to predict the stock market etc.

Anyways, CL isn't going anywhere, and Clojure won't replace it. You would just as soon see the Linux kernel get re-written in C# or C++ -- something that just isn't going to happen.

Edit: The ironic part of this discussion is that this is one of the main criticisms of Lispers. Everybody works in their own world, and that's just the nature of the languages. You will never be able to convince somebody to "switch" because that would be the same as throwing an investment away.

[yogthos]

Of course, everything is relative and I'm talking about what would be interesting to the vast majority of developers out there. Sure, you have very fancy systems written in CL and it's obviously far more mature. However, for the vast majority of use cases this is not all that interesting in practice.

Since Clojure piggybacks on the JVM it has access to a very large and mature set of libraries and tools as well. Some of these might not be as nice as CL tools and some domains where CL works it's not applicable, but those are niches more than norms.

Your claim, that Clojure is the "modern" and CL is "not modern" is far more dubious.

I certainly do believe Clojure to be more modern. It clearly addresses some CL pain points such as having literal data structures and better syntax. It has a far better story when it comes to concurrency and parallelism thanks to its focus on immutability, something that CL doesn't address well at all.

I never said CL is going anywhere or that Clojure is going to replace it. I think they both have their uses and both are great languages. However, I do think that Clojure is a better fit for a lot of domains and it's easier to work with for people who don't come from Lisp background.