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0 pointsmartinced13y ago0 comments

Funny... No latter than yesterday I used something very similar to Lisp macros to add function profiling to Clojure functions. Took very few lines of code, like you'd expect from a Lisp.

Parenthesis serves the purpose of homoiconicity and it looks like Clojure is homoiconic... sexp / lambda expressions / HoF / macros / etc.

You know: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."

Regarding people like you, the "haters gonna hate" type of people, here's what Rich Hickey has to say:

"Life is too short to spend time on such people. Plenty of Lisp experts have recognized Clojure as a Lisp. I don’t expect everyone to prefer Clojure over their favorite Lisp. If it wasn’t different in some ways, there’d be little reason for it to exist."

I'd add that you're commenting on a board created by a real Lisp hacker who created its own Lisp and, if I'm not mistaken, who's now recommending Clojure has the Lisp dialect to learn for Lisp newcomers.

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dschiptsov13y ago

The whole point is that it isn't like duck. The general evaluation rule with few special cases is broken, it is a whole bunch of special cases. Adding data-structures to a Lisp ruins it. It become a mess of a wired syntax, various comprehensions and unnecessary explicit conventions.

The beauty and elegance of a Lisp lies in that there is nothing to remove - a few selected ideas put together - and one common for code and data underlying list structure. This leads to a compact, readable code with relatively easily "maps to" machine code, because the memory is flat.

I don't care what Rich Hickey said. For me he is much better salesman, than engineer. He is very clever at selling, no doubt. But the whole Java scam is about clever selling of unnecessary complications from the very first days.

Moreover, those Lisp experts I have learned from didn't even mention Clojure.)

rplevy13y ago

> Adding data-structures to a Lisp ruins it.

By this standard, Common Lisp is a "ruined" Lisp. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp#Data_structures

In Clojure the data structures work consistently across the language, which to me is one of many reasons why Clojure is a better Lisp than Common Lisp (but CL has its place).

> Moreover, those Lisp experts I have learned from didn't even mention Clojure.

On the contrary, Clojure is and has since its inception been praised and often adopted by prominent users of Scheme and Common Lisp (the list is too long, but for example the late Daniel Weinreb declared Clojure the future of Lisp). The Clojure conference in Portland this last few days is a perfect example of the cross-fertilization between the Racket/Scheme logic programming subcultures and the Clojure logic programming subcultures.

dschiptsov13y ago

Come on. Arrays are absolutely necessary for certain algorithms, so, they are here, so are efficient hash-tables. Structures (records) were standardized, but they are nothing but a bunch of macros. And that is good-enough.)

I'm a virtual student of prof. Brian Harvey (and reader of pg and Norvig).

And there is nothing special in trying to "port" the ideas form the "old" Lisp world to Clojure and present them as a new. Simple trick. All those logic programming buzz is from karen, query language of datatomic is from old expert systems, etc.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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dschiptsov13y ago

Moreover, those Lisp experts I have learned from didn't even mention Clojure.)

rplevy13y ago

> Adding data-structures to a Lisp ruins it.

By this standard, Common Lisp is a "ruined" Lisp. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp#Data_structures

In Clojure the data structures work consistently across the language, which to me is one of many reasons why Clojure is a better Lisp than Common Lisp (but CL has its place).

> Moreover, those Lisp experts I have learned from didn't even mention Clojure.

dschiptsov13y ago

I'm a virtual student of prof. Brian Harvey (and reader of pg and Norvig).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse