Ask HN: Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=343594

by btw0 • 18 years ago

61 80 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There seems to be a lot of people even some intelligent ones who are lately talking about and exploring clojure, a new lisp dialect run in JVM. It looks really promising, but a lot of people especially lisp programmers have an inherent hatred in java. How is that? what do you think about this ``lisp in JVM''? Is the clojure the future of lisp?

drcode• 18 years ago

The reason Clojure is successful right now IMHO is because:

    1. It isn't afraid to revisit the basic design tenets of Common Lisp and Scheme
    2. It has reasonably useful libraries (both through the JVM and written in native Clojure)

No other Lisp dialect has done this recently. My point is that its success doesn't have much to do, from what I can tell, with the actual design of the language. Clojure does fix annoyances in CL and Scheme (low hanging fruit) but I personally still prefer other modern dialects, like arc, in terms of basic language design.

The reason arc is crashing and burning right now is that it doesn't address #2 at all. Plus, arc is suffering from an absentee benevolent dictator.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

its success doesn't have much to do, from what I can tell, with the actual design of the language

Of course it does. "Revisit[ing] the basic design tenets of Common Lisp and Scheme" is actual language design. Moreover, "fixing" CL and Scheme is not "low hanging fruit". It's a hard thing to do, and most people who try make a mess of things.

jrockway2• 18 years ago

Moreover, "fixing" CL and Scheme is not "low hanging fruit". It's a hard thing to do, and most people who try make a mess of things.

I agree here. Most people think fixing CL means making "let" use fewer parenthesis. (Clojure does this.)

Anyone that has used Lisp for more than 30 seconds knows that this is not a particularly worthwhile change. More syntax characters just to save two characters in a let binding? No thanks.

(BTW, you can always use destructuring-bind instead of let -- (destructuring-bind (foo bar baz) '(1 2 3) ...). There, you saved some parens!)

Honestly, Clojure doesn't sit really well with me. It tries to be different from both CL and Scheme simply for the sake of being different, which is pretty annoying. For example, look at the "definers". In CL, the scheme is pretty simple -- defun, defvar, defgeneric, defmethod, ... In Scheme, "define" is polymorphic, so it's all you ever need. In Clojure, the "definers" are just random words; def/defn, etc. Oh boy, we saved 3 characters! I am going to be so much more productive now!

Anyway, I will stick to CL for now.

schtog2• 18 years ago

What about the design of Arc do you prefer over Clojure?

nihilocrat2• 18 years ago

Number 2 is the killer feature in my opinion. Leveraging a humongous, popular, and mature set of libraries that the JVM gives makes Clojure stand out, and is probably why it's getting so much attention. The "real world" usually favors languages with "batteries included".

brlewis• 18 years ago

If that were true, Kawa and SISC (good Scheme compiler and interpreter for the JVM, respectively) would already have grabbed that attention.

comatose_kid4• 18 years ago

It's too early for libraries to be built on a language that is still in the experimental stage.

While I enjoyed writing arc code, I'm in no hurry to see a huge infrastructure pop up around the language as it stands. What's the rush? Let pg and rtm take whatever time they need to build a language they are happy with.

serhei• 18 years ago

> Let pg and rtm take whatever time they need to build a language they are happy with.

Yeah, pg and rtm can do whatever they want. Meanwhile, I want a language I'm happy with.

pg3• 18 years ago

Powerful libraries are a cheap way to make a new language the language du jour. (Think Rails.) They're not the critical ingredient if you're trying to make something to last; they may even hurt.

john_amendall• 18 years ago

Libraries are just one aspect of it. Clojure's already got an excellent VM and a sound programming model to deal with concurrency.

EliAndrewC• 18 years ago

How could it hurt a language's lasting power for it to have powerful libraries?

Do you mean that it might hurt Clojure specifically, because it relies on Java's libraries in particular? Or was it a more general point?

mixmax• 18 years ago

Yes, but without powerful libraries a language isn't much good for real world use. And if nobody uses the language it won't have a community and feedback. Without a community people will move on, and it will end up as a pet project.

jmatt• 18 years ago

This post just seems to be begging for comment ~ maybe it's because it's relatively rare that we get pg talking about arc.

they may even hurt.

I'm assuming you are referring to the maintenance and backward compatibility that is required as soon as you have libraries. Plus good libraries can be had even in bad languages - so it's not a good reflection of the language. Are you suggesting libraries should be a completely separate project with potentially many choices? The problem with this can be seen in Scheme. It's hard to move from project to project (job to job) when they use different implementations and those related libraries. Learning the related core libraries is often not worth it; if the scope of the project is small. Invariably libraries do not transfer well - maybe that is the problem that needs to be solved... Even with formalities like R5RS or R6RS core libraries are still implementation specific.

Plus, arc is suffering from an absentee benevolent dictator.

... You are missed over at the arclanguage forums. (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=8462) Specifically some direction for those of us that enjoy writing arc would be great. There are plenty of people that know and write arc - why not put them to work. What is your opinion of the community version of arc (http://github.com/nex3/arc/tree/master)? Do you use it? Is it blasphemy? Is this all just a giant social experiment to see what will happen to the language and community given no leadership and x-number of years?

s3graham• 18 years ago

> its success doesn't have much to do, from what I can tell, with the actual design of the language.

Wow, really? This seems way off base to me. The only reason I care about Clojure is 'persistent' data structures that give us some chance of writing code that /just, maybe, possibly/ will execute usefully on the 1024+-core boxes we're going to be using shortly. That's the only reason I care about it, and I'd say that's fundamentally the design of the language.

twopoint718• 18 years ago

There is a video (http://clojure.blip.tv/) by the creator of Clojure which argues (quite convincingly) that it is really Java, the language, that some people may have problems with and that Java, the runtime environment, (JVM) is a great platform in which to target your code.

Lots of work is being done in areas such as JIT and adaptive optimization in the runtime environment. By targeting the JVM you get to take advantage of all that work put into optimization and thousands of libraries; it gets you a lot of leverage fast.

gtani• 18 years ago

arguing about clojure vs. scala is the next big religious war

http://www.cio.com/article/print/454520

http://almaer.com/blog/the-next-big-language-theory-practice...

markessien12• 18 years ago

Lisp will never be popular. We are humans and our brains are wired for a certain type of thinking. Lisp breaks this model, and so it's difficult for people to pick it up.

The trend has always been to easier and easier languages - I don't remember any case where a more complex language, no matter how useful, has become the next big thing.

The only thing that can make lisp popular is a framework or API based off it. Something that offers something new or something easier.

ajross• 18 years ago

So how does that trend explain C++, or Java, or C#, all of which are clearly evolving in the direction of increased complexity. Likewise Python today is a vastly more complicated environment than the language I learned 8 years ago. And Ruby is quirkier still, taking most of perl's weird syntax and adding an object model from smalltalk and a statement-based execution metaphor that comes straight out of BASIC -- certainly not a "simple" language.

C is a simple language. Scheme is a simple language. Everything else is growing more complicated by the day.

markessien12• 18 years ago

A language will always grow in complexity. But it does not become more popular because it grows in complexity.

My point was that the trend in popularity is towards less complex languages - i.e, languages that abstract away difficulty. In that respect, C++ is less complex than C.

davidw• 18 years ago

I don't think that Java is more complex than C++ in terms of the language itself. I think that being simpler is actually one of the reasons it has caught on.

jamesbritt2• 18 years ago

"And Ruby is quirkier still, taking most of perl's weird syntax ..."

Um, what?

I don't think you know much Ruby.

Hexstream3• 18 years ago

"We are humans and our brains are wired for a certain type of thinking. Lisp breaks this model, and so it's difficult for people to pick it up."

Please elaborate. I'd love to refute if there was something in there to refute. I really don't see how Lisp is inherently less (or for that matter, more) graspable on a fundamental level. Are you a neurologist? And do you have any actual experience with Lisp?

markessien12• 18 years ago

If you have ever been in a math class with people who are not programmers, who are just plain old Joes, you'll notice that the most difficult subjects have to do with abstractions.

When particular concepts are represented by abstract concepts, and operations are executed on these concepts, that's where most people shut down. That's why many people don't go into programming - they are not able to easily deal with the abstractions that programmers have to deal with.

Languages that are similar to human languages - i.e, one word, one 'object' or 'concept' are easy for people to understand. A language like lisp is not even near to that - it depends completely on abstractions of concepts, and this is where the core difficulty for most people would lie.

For example, to take this example from wikipedia:

(list '1 '2 'foo)

The statement above is very difficult to reconcile with real world concepts, it's very difficult to put into the mental boxes we have grown up with.

Contrast with python:

if object is not null:

Languages don't have to be similar to english, but they have to be mentally mapable to models we already know. This is difficult to do with Lisp. With lisp, you have to understand new concepts. It's just not that easy for most people.

whacked_new3• 18 years ago

> We are humans and our brains are wired for a certain type of thinking. Lisp breaks this model, and so it's difficult for people to pick it up.

If you have ever parsed a syntactic tree, you'll realize that it's inherently an s-expression. That means that everything you ever say, and all human communication for that matter, are s-expressions.

Sans the logic, operators, symbol quoting and observance of rules (first item is interpreted as a function), lisp is at its core as close to human language you'll ever get. Popularity depends on other things, but lisp doesn't break the way we think.

markessien12• 18 years ago

Take a look at this sample from wikipedia:

(defun factorial (n) (if (<= n 1) 1 (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))

Now imagine trying to explain that to a person who does not use a computer. Humans always start learning by looking for the objects, then applying an action on the object. With lisp, this object is not obvious, and the actions being applies are not obvious either.

nihilocrat2• 18 years ago

It's not "hard", it's just "different". I don't see how it breaks a "certain type of thinking" that we are "wired" for, other than that it fundamentally different from the imperative / structured programming that 99% of programmers are introduced to in their first language. I don't see how breaking with that model is beyond the ken of human beings. You can even take intermediate steps; learning Python and its code introspection features makes "code == data" a lot simpler to grok because you've already seen that sort of thing before.

Maybe the electrician just wired your brain wrong. You might want to try and get a refund.

markessien12• 18 years ago

No, it's fundamentally difficult for human beings. You know why? Take a look at mathematics. It is fundamentally difficult for human beings because it does not fit the model that we grew up with evolutionarily.

Math is just a language, but it's a very difficult language for most human beings to learn because we don't naturally think using those type of expressions.

Lisp was created as mathematical notation for computers. It is based of a language that the most people have difficulty with in school.

I'm good at math, and I have no problem with lisp. I'm just pointing out that it will not be the next big thing because this type of thinking is not easy for most people to get into. Pythonic thinking on the other hand is easy for people to understand.

comatose_kid4• 18 years ago

While I disagree with you, I think it's unfortunate that your comment was modded down.

I'd respond by saying that lisp is an easier language to learn than C (for example) - they syntax is much more consistent.

markessien12• 18 years ago

Lisp would not be easier to learn than C if you had to do the OS specific stuff you do in C in Lisp.

utx0010• 18 years ago

Danielle Steele vs. Jane Austen ... or something.

ivanstojic2• 18 years ago

I find that after a year of Common Lisp, I don't really care about Clojure. On the other hand, through the JVM and the Java API, it offers for free some of the things which were never available as a CL standard feature.

However, CL is a language specification, while Java is for better or worse much more than that.

Dilpil• 18 years ago

Good luck teaching the unwashed masses lisp.

jamesbritt2• 18 years ago

"Good luck teaching the unwashed masses lisp."

What problems did you have learning Lisp?

PieSquared• 18 years ago

A friend of mine was being taught Java in an introductory programming course (although he already knew some BASIC). He was having a lot of trouble, so I introduced him to Lisp... After touring through some of the more basic features (no macro-writing or call/cc), he responded with, "Whoa... This is so much simpler than Java, it makes so much more sense."

My take on that was that the only reason people find Java easier is because it's more similar to other curly-brace languages, the ones they already know. If you take a newcomer to programming, Lisp just may actually be simpler. So the unwashed masses still have some hope.

michaelneale2• 18 years ago

I know its a cliche, and not really a "programming language" but XML has caught on with the masses (yes, its still popular, although I would wager most here would hate to edit it by hand).

Who knows what the future holds. Good luck indeed !

fab13n• 18 years ago

Anecdotal evidence of teaching Scheme as a first language in a French university shows that it's rather easy to learn, provided that there isn't too much to be unlearned by the audience. Mind you, on 2nd semester they had to learn some Visual Basic and found it gratuitously complicated.

Unwashed masses have accepted to learned very complex frameworks and metaprogramming tools around Java; those stuff are not simpler than, say, Common Lisp. They learned it because the consensus (among their peers) was that these were professional tools, useful for one's career. If a Lisp ever gained that fashionability, it would no doubt be learned very quickly by those "unwashed" masses, even if most of them wouldn't ever reach the guru status.

anc2020• 18 years ago

Careful. The year of the Lisp is not far off.

schtog2• 18 years ago

It is possible to write very dense and abstract functional code that is hard to understand but some Lisp-code is so readable you wonder if it is actually code!

That said I don't see Lisp becoming big. Scala probably has a better chance.

Scalalooks great on paper and is better than JAVA in my opinion. However in practice it still feels very heavy and kind of JAVA-ish. Not for me but perhaps a natural step for a lot of JAVA-developers.

michaelneale2• 18 years ago

Anyone played much with compjure? I loved the ideas in it - last I tried however I wasn't able to make changes and refresh - I had to restart the app to see changes. Interestingly (and nicely) it "compiled" the changes up front, telling me of any errors. That part was nice but having a F5 refresh/change cycle for web apps I think is expected now.

Ask HN: Is clojure (lisp in JVM) next big thing?

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