Why and how Clojure and Racket – two “most modern” Lisps – differ

https://klibert.pl/posts/clojure_and_racket_history.html

by klibertp • 9 years ago

6 7 9 years ago

klibertp3• 9 years ago

This is a kind of a foreword to the promised comparison of Clojure and Racket. It'll take another couple of weeks to get the following two posts out, I'll email those interested. Also, there's RSS feed on the blog now, feel free to subscribe :)

brudgers2• 9 years ago

An interesting article. For me the more languages I look at, the more muddied the inheritance tree.

The more I look at Common Lisp, the more I see it's genetic finger print in Clojure. Racket's #sequence abstraction is very similar to Common Lisp's #sequence abstraction. Clojure's #collection abstraction is perhaps, like Racket's #sequence an extension of Common Lisps #sequence, or perhaps a more direct implementation of Smalltalk's #Collection abstract class.

The more I look at Smalltalk, the more likely I think this may be since a lot of the behavior of Clojure #collections looks like message passing -- i.e. Clojure #collections are also functions that accept arguments.

klibertp3• 9 years ago

Thanks :)

I think CL's biggest influences on Clojure are in: the namespace system, support for multimethods, and macro system (and keyword lists). Now that you mention it, CL also has sequences, and I can easily imagine Clojure's `into` function to be Rich's answer to CL's `map result-type ...` problem with the generic (but in the meaning of "generic function", not generic multi-method, as noted in [1]) interface. But you're right: in Smalltalk Dictionary is a subclass of Collection, and Clojure collections are famous for working with lists, vectors, sets, and also maps.

I think only Rich himself could say which, CL or Smalltalk, had a bigger impact on Clojure's collections. I know from Wiki that he worked with CL and Java (so maybe, Java collections? I don't know Java...), but don't know what other languages he learned. I now see Ruby is listed among influences on Clojure: how close are Ruby's Enumerable to Smalltalk collections? The inspiration could have come that way :)

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node141.html

Why and how Clojure and Racket – two “most modern” Lisps – differ

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