Thoughts on Clojure

I don't find these to be really good advantages.. First, "functional" isn't an advantage.. I mean, the advantage of functional code might be easier maintenance, concise code, easier to concurrence etc.. but "functional" isn't an advantage. It's like saying C++ is better than ruby because it is imperative or OO.. "Why is imperative or OO better?", that's the interesting part.

In my opinion, the advantage of clojure by comparing it with Ruby are:

- You get the best of Java (lots of library, OO) - You get the best of Lisp (macro, high level function)

acangiano• 16 years ago

> First, "functional" isn't an advantage.. I mean, the advantage of functional code might be easier maintenance, concise code, easier to concurrence etc..

Those are all good reasons why functional programming is an advantage. I guess you object to my grouping of all these under the "functional" umbrella term.

> In my opinion, the advantage of clojure by comparing it with Ruby are: - You get the best of Java (lots of library, OO)

I mention this as well, but that's not really an advantage over Ruby. JRuby gives you access to all the Java libraries you want.

d0m2• 16 years ago

What I meant is that functional in this situation is a bit vague.

Clojure Dude (talking to ruby dude): Hey, you should try clojure.

Ruby Dude: What is clojure ?

Clojure Dude: Oh, clojure is a lisp/functional language. You should really give it a try.

Ruby Dude: Why?

Clojure Dude: Its main advantage is that it's functional.

Ruby Dude: Wow, you convince me. I'm switching!

funcall2• 16 years ago

For a certain (large) class of programs, being "functional" is an advantage. Interestingly, you made the point that being functional means easier maintenance etc., but fail to attribute those advantages to being functional. If your argument is that there can be bad functional code which performs worse than non-functional (imperative or OO) code, I don't disagree. However, in the multicore future that our semiconductor overlords have in store for us, functional programming has a demonstrable advantage in helping build understandable and robust programs.

WilliamLP• 16 years ago

I don't think you should claim "demonstrable" and "future" in the same sentence. "Theoretical" or even "promising", perhaps. The most performance intensive problems in the world, when they have competition, are very much still solved in C and C++.

cageface4• 16 years ago

From an interview with the father of Haskell:

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/armstrong-peyton-jones-erlan...

But it turned out to be very hard to turn that into actual wall clock speedups on processes, leaving aside all issues of robustness or that kind of stuff, because if you do that style of concurrency you get lots of very tiny fine-grained processes and you get no locality and you get very difficult scheduling problems. The overheads overwhelm the benefits, in short.

It may be true that FP does make concurrency easier, but I don't think this has been demonstrated to be generally true yet and it's certainly not as simple as just eliminating side effects from your code.

jcromartie• 16 years ago

Functional programming eliminates mutable objects, and mutable objects are (at a certain scale and in certain scopes) the new spaghetti code. I have worked with too many projects where twiddling the attributes of distant (global/static/inherited/etc.) things was necessary to get anything done, and it's obnoxious. It's too many indirections.

With functional languages and "dumb" data you don't have to guess about what your data can do. You just do what you want with it.

fbcocq• 16 years ago

If it gets added to SPOJ (https://www.spoj.pl/) I'll give it another shot. The JVM is just a frustrating platform when it comes to experimenting with new languages.

aphyr• 16 years ago

I really want to get into Clojure, but everything I've read suggests that I'll have to learn Emacs to do it. Does anyone think giving up Vim for a few months is worth it?

FlemishBeeCycle• 16 years ago

There's a few scripts to help you out:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2501

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

You can modify Emacs to mimic Vim, which might be help you bridge the gap:

http://www.sanityinc.com/articles/vim-vs-emacs

tsuraan• 16 years ago

I've been using clojure for a while now (nothing huge LOC-wise, but it's a pretty significant part a large system). I use vim, and haven't had any troubles. The clojure REPL doesn't seem to have readline support, but it works fine with the rlwrap program. I've been meaning to learn emacs to try out the niftier select and execute functionality that it has, but vim does work for me.

TallGuyShort• 16 years ago

I still use exclusively Vim for all my clojure coding. I have Vim in one window (with VimClojure for syntax highlighting and some other features), a REPL in another (for quick experimenting), and my ant script in another for compiling and testing the whole thing. It's not as integrated as SLIME and emacs, but I don't feel like my tools are slowing me down significantly.

frognibble• 16 years ago

This is exactly how I work with Clojure. Emacs is not required to develop in Clojure.

jgracin• 16 years ago

With Emacs(w/paredit)+SLIME you would be doing "interactive development" which is really a fundamentally different and better way of using Lisp. I cannot recommend it enough.

kuszi• 16 years ago

You can even try it online: http://ideone.com/l7Nqw

technomancy• 16 years ago

I'm a huge Emacs fan, but I'd recommend against learning Emacs and Clojure at the same time. While the tight REPL integration can be difficult to set up in vim, you can use a separate REPL/editor environment to get going, and then ease yourself into a more integrated environment once you get a little more familiar with things.

peregrine• 16 years ago

This is a great place to look for several IDE's and guides to getting started with VIM.

http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/clojure/Getting_Started

Thoughts on Clojure

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