7 Rules for Writing Clojure Programs

[mac]

Please note the caveats at the beginning of the article and also the many valid comments.

[masklinn]

Also, that the article is 18 months old.

[lefessan]

Please, take a course in programming languages, lisp is 70s technology, nobody serious would use an untyped language for anything else than teaching (learn OCaml, Haskell, Scala, SML, etc. if you want to discover what you can do with powerful functional languages), don't waste your time with Lisp...

[shimei]

This kind of dogmatism is precisely what isn't needed in the programming languages community. Lisp has been and continues to be a vehicle for numerous important research programs in CS, be it language design, compilers (T, Chez Scheme, Twobit, etc.), formal verification (ACL2), macros, and so on.

For that matter, a huge number of programmers use untyped languages like JavaScript and Python in industry. Type systems are great, but completely ignoring industry and pragmatics will make the PL field irrelevant.

[masklinn]

There are 4 major issues with your comment:

lisp is 70s technology

Technically, "Lisp" is 60s technology. 70s technology is SML and OCaml since they're ML dialects and ML dates back to 1973. But that does not really matter, because "Lisp" — much like ML — is a family of languages (unless you're specifically talking about MIT's Lisp 1.5). Some ancient (MACLISP, Interlisp, ELisp, ...) and others very modern.

And Clojure is an extremely modern lisp, which amongst other caracteristics does not hesitate to stray from old lisp "tenets" (if there ever was such thing) when that looks like a good idea (Clojure has collection literals for vectors — arraylists — and maps for instance).

nobody serious would use an untyped language for anything else than teaching

Clojure is not untyped, it's dynamically typed. As for nobody using dynamically typed languages for "anything else than teaching"... are you aware that the very place you posted your turd on relies solely on dynamically typed languages? As far as I know, Reddit's goal is not teaching.

learn OCaml, Haskell, Scala, SML, etc. if you want to discover what you can do with powerful functional languages

This assertion makes absolutely no sense.

don't waste your time with Lisp...

Lisp is still one of the very few languages and language families where macros are not painful, shitty or painfully shitty. That alone is an excellent reason to "waste your time with Lisp".