Clojure: 1, Common Lisp: 0

http://briancarper.net/2009/01/19/clojure-1-common-lisp-0/

by mqt • 18 years ago

112 68 18 years ago

briancarper.net

dimitar• 18 years ago

Would the same Clojure advantages apply to Armed Bear CL which also runs on the JVM?

jefffoster• 18 years ago

Not in my opinion.

Using Java libraries from Clojure is very simple e.g. (.substring "abcd" 2 3) ==> "c".

Armed Bear on the other hand requires a lot more scaffolding code to make a Java call (you have to get the class, find the method and then call it).

jwilliams• 18 years ago

This might be a good experiment, but the examples seem a bit flimsy to me.

For example - Whilst it may well be better from his experience, Timestamp has always been an anomaly in Java (it doesn't necessarily play nicely with Date)....

Equally I've never found browsing the filesystem that superb in Java - in fact the whole FileFilter, FilenameFilter thing can be quite clunky to use... It's one area where I've never felt more than a smidgen away from C (even moreso now with the NIO library).

So - maybe better, certainly not perfect - Either way they didn't on the weight of it seem killer arguments.

tlrobinson2• 18 years ago

Being on top of the JVM is also one of the really nice things about Rhino (Mozilla's JVM based JavaScript interpreter: http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/). You have access to a zillion Java libraries. Taking two of their examples:

MySQL:

    var conn = java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://"+host+"/"+db+"?user="+user+"&password="+password),
        statement = conn.createStatement(),
        resultset = statement.executeQuery("SELECT * FROM test");
        // do stuff!

Jetty also works from Rhino:

    var server = new Packages.org.mortbay.jetty.Server(8080);

    server.setHandler(new Packages.org.mortbay.jetty.handler.AbstractHandler({
        handle: function(target, request, response, dispatch){
            // do stuff!
            request.setHandled(true);
        }
    }));
    server.start();

Obviously these could be wrapped up in more JavaScripty libraries, but all the hard work is done for you.

Avshalom• 18 years ago

for more javascripty DB/server stuff http://dev.helma.org/ is (though relatively unknown) the premier (kinda) server side javascript library/framework,

tlrobinson2• 18 years ago

There's a lot of monolithic server side JavaScript packages like Helma, but I want something more modular. Also, Helma is written in mostly Java I believe, rather than JavaScript, which is ok if you don't want to hack on Helma itself (or if you know and like Java), but I'd rather have an all (or at least mostly) JavaScript solution.

Anyway, I started working on part of a solution for this: Jack (http://github.com/tlrobinson/jack), which is like Rack (http://rack.rubyforge.org) but for JavaScript.

If you don't know, Rack/Jack are like bridges between webservers and Ruby/JavaScript web apps/frameworks, so framework/app devs don't need to worry about what server they're using, they just write to the Rack API. It also includes "middleware" which lets you pre and post process requests, which allows for neat things like intercepting some requests and serving static files, or gzipping responses, etc (in a server agnostic way)

Right now it only works with Rhino+Jetty but ideally it will work with a number of JavaScript interpreters and webservers.

It also includes a Sinatra-like routing framework (called Roundabout), which lets you define routes like

    GET("/user/{username}", function() {
        var user = this.wildcards["username"];
        // do stuff!
        return resulting_html;
    }

Jack and Roundabout, combined with your other frameworks of choice, like ActiveRecord.js (http://activerecordjs.org/) make a pretty good solution, I think.

habibur3• 18 years ago

In Lisp one has the freedom to code in Structured Programming, OOP, AOP, FP, meta programming, or create his own DSL.

Does the same stand true for Clojure?

I am thinking about switching. Only risk is that if it doesn't work, I can't port the code anywhere else, because it's so different from CL.

weavejester6• 18 years ago

Clojure is a Lisp, so you get all the usual things like first class functions and macros. Clojure leans toward FP philosophically, so all the built in data structures are immutable. Concurrency support is generally very good, and it has some useful syntax sugar for vectors and maps.

I prefer Clojure over all the other Lisps I've tried, but YMMV.

habibur3• 18 years ago

Good. Only thing missing in Clojure seems OOP. But I can live without that.

Hope Clojure doesn't push the FP thing too far. Pure functional languages are evil. In broad sense, pure anything in evil. Look what Java turned into trying to be a pure (or too much of an) object oriented language.

It’s multi paradigm that wins. Giving programmers freedom on how he wants to code any specific set of problem.

mcxx6• 18 years ago

This guy is just rambling about CL and writing about his inability. I never had problems with SBCL on any machine, runs on my VPS, with threading, like a charm. Also, noone forced him to learn and use Emacs. There are Vim modes or CUPS for Eclipse. Destructive functions are the language's feature. If not sure, just use non-destructive. It's also not CL's fault he doesn't understand macros and can't use CL-WHO.

I like Clojure, but I like CL better. One guy's incompetence learning CL doesn't mean Clojure wins.

jimbokun3• 18 years ago

"I never had problems with SBCL on any machine"

I did, and so did this author.

So who's anecdote wins?

mcxx6• 18 years ago

Noone's. The point is it's not a valid argument. The sameway the author had problems deploying SBCL on his machine, I could have problems deploying JVM on mine.

habibur3• 18 years ago

Reddit was initially built on CMUCL on FreeBSD. Here is what Steve Huffman said on why they switched to python one weekend.

"The biggest trouble that plagued us was that we could never quite get Lisp reddit stable enough to sleep at night. There were weird threading issues that would bring the site to its knees a couple times a day and required constant monitoring."

You can read more of it in this blog entry.

http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2005/12/reddit-and-lisp-psyc...

Edit: Corrected :-)

Zak2• 18 years ago

As did I. In my case, the problem was running it on a VPS that had no user-visible swap, no way to add swap space and possibly some other memory-related oddities that I don't remember. The workaround ended up being to limit SBCL's memory usage with --dynamic-space-size.

fab13n• 18 years ago

This attitude ("It's good enough for me, I don't care anymore about the learning curve's steepness, and I'm indifferent/enthused that my language is only accessible to a tiny minority") captures the CL spirit quite well. It also explains why you have to do so much wheel reinvention when you code in CL: those lower lifeform coders, who you openly despise, produce working, ready-to-use libs for most common tasks on JVM, not for CL dialects. Up to you to reimplement your superior libs in your superior language for your superior self.

CL is the perfect language for those who consider that development is not a social activity, and luckily for you, there are a couple of niches where this remains a sustainable delusion. For now. Meanwhile, Clojure carries on the Lisp heritage in the branch of software development that's not going to get extinct soon.

mcxx6• 18 years ago

I don't have that attitude and I'm sorry if you encountered it (it's true the Lisp community could be friendlier, warmer to newcomers). However, what can a I (or any other Lisp programmer for that matter) do about the steep learning cure you mention? You have to try for yourself to learn the language, noone's going to do it for you.

vikram3• 18 years ago

I think CL is suitable for projects which are fluid and have a very few people working on them. Speaking from personal experience 1 person can get an awful lot done in CL, very quickly. Compared to any other scripting language. I've worked with CL, Python and Ruby. There are certain things that I think are impossible to write in Python.

I started by writing a domain-specific crawler which extracted certain information from a bunch of sites. But the sites I was crawling changed their design mid way. So I then ended up writing a program in CL, to which I describe the data that the site has. E.g. Name-of-city is "Edinburgh", Address is '15 Market Place, ED12', First-Movie-name is 'Bend it like Beckham', First-showing-date is '15 Jan', First-showing-time is '14:20'. The program then produces a function which when give a page from this website extracts this information in the form of an alist so that it can be pushed into the database.

Funnily enough the my site which shows this data runs on django.

DTrejo• 18 years ago

For anyone interested in the Eclipse plugin, it is CUSP: http://www.bitfauna.com/projects/cusp/

rw2• 18 years ago

Someone please compare Clojure to PLT Scheme.

hapless• 18 years ago

PLT scheme is primarily used for education. Pedagogy is (or at least was) the project's central goal.

Clojure is a general purpose project. It is not specifically competing for that space.

I'm sure that the average student can get up and running with DrScheme/PLT faster than with Clojure, but I doubt anyone is going to write an angry article about that.

apgwoz• 18 years ago

See, that's the common misconception with PLT. While it was built for education, it's really a nice full featured system for any use. Just use something other than the "Beginning Student" language.

jncraton• 18 years ago

His shiny new Clojure powered site is down for me...

"The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."

http://origamigallery.net/

icey2• 18 years ago

Between being posted here and on reddit, I'm sure he's getting much more traffic than his host is accustomed to.

weavejester6• 18 years ago

Curiously, the server appears to be Apache rather than Jetty.

twism• 18 years ago

It is common to have Apache as your static web server to serve images/css/js files and use modules such as mod_rewrite or mod_jk to route to your dynamic context. It seems like his dynamic content server is down (could be the jetty server he was referring to), hence the 503 error code.

newt0311• 18 years ago

From: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=395951

"Yes it [Common Lisp] does [look bloated]. It has at least 4 different ways to loop, 4 different types of arguments to functions, 5 or 6 different lets (functions, macros, let* , normal let, ...), 3 or 4 different kinds of variables (with no unifying underlying theme), and at least 3 different flow models (the nested lists, tagbodies, loops with returns, etc...). That is exactly the same problem with C++. Instead of finding unifying abstractions which give the same functionality with 1 idea, they have chosen to add in multiple specific quick fixes to the language. They have chosen to amend the language with a thousand small changes, each suited to its own little use case, and have ended up with a monster of a standard that takes up 15 megabytes in 2300 files with 110,000 hyperlinks. Thats 15 mega bytes mostly of text.

Scheme is a lot better but its going the way of CL, slowly but surely."

Thats exactly what we are seeing here.

sunkencity• 18 years ago

In a trivial setup it's pretty easy to get the jvm up and running, but making a good cached deploy of apache httpd fronting tomcat and a database server isn't very easy. It's not very easy to set up a server with rails either (easier these days but still a pain if you're a noob). I'm not sure how easy something deploys is critical for the value of a platform. Developers should understand how stuff are deployed but it's not necessary that they know how to do it correctly, nor should every developer deploy their own applications. (I mean, it doesn't hurt if they know how to do it, but it's better that developers spend their main time developing not minding the server farms).

critic2• 18 years ago

In one of the video lectures the author of Clojure seemed to claim that Clojure is as fast as Java. IME though that's not quite the case.

Zak2• 18 years ago

Clojure can be as fast as Java on benchmark-type code using type hints, Java interop and unchecked math. Idiomatic Clojure code will be slower on benchmarks. Operations on persistent data structures are slower than mutation. Reflection takes time.

Back in the real world, Clojure actually does pretty well for itself. As an example, it seems to be fairly common to generate collections of various types and then only use part of them. In Clojure, most of the time those collections would be lazy, saving computations every time the whole thing isn't needed. Also, using clojure.parallel, many operations can be parallelized trivially. I got a 50% speedup running a genetic algorithm on a dual-core machine just by changing a sort to psort.

Of course, hand-optimized Java may still be faster, but Clojure makes it easier.

vikram3• 18 years ago

I'm going to make a different kind of statement here. Something that I've learnt from my CL experience.

When I think about solving a problem by writing new software, I ask myself, is a run of a mill problem like a website which serves data, or making use of a bunch of libraries to do something. Then use rails/django, I use django/python.

If I don't know what the solution will look like and I don't think I'm going to need existing libraries. I'll use CL everytime.

Horses for courses. Nails and hammmers.

Clojure: 1, Common Lisp: 0

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