5 ms·

> ... Clojure is fine (though any other Lisp would arguably be better than Clojure). Care to elaborate why you think any other Lisp is better than Clojure? I w

• bitwize 10y ago
  Clojure has neither the cool constructs of CL (CLOS, conditions) nor the minimal design and fantastic set of control primitives of Scheme. In fact it has no significant advantage over Scheme aside from running on the JVM, and a few disadvantages (recur, why TF are lambda lists vectors?, etc.). It's different enough to be weird and annoying, but the differences aren't advantageous enough to make me want to switch: Scheme (and CL!) has been made to run efficiently on the JVM (with some caveats, which Clojure has also!).
  • xiaomai 10y ago
    I mostly agree with you, but I think the out-of-the-box immutable data structures and sugar around around maps are very nice compared to the out-of-the-box scheme/racket experience.
    • riboflava 10y ago
      I'm a fan of the out of the box immutable data structures and like the sugar, though you can get both in Lisp if you want. (Presumably Racket as well.) Lisp has everything, and more, though sometimes you have to work for it. I do enjoy Clojure's interop with the JVM, but that along with the community producing interesting things (this includes ClojureScript) are the primary reasons I care about Clojure at all. On the nice-to-work-with side of things I really enjoy that it was designed by one person rather than a standards committee from decades ago, it feels fresh working with it, but if you stranded me on an island and gave me one language to have for the rest of time I'd pick Lisp for its power.
      • technomancy 10y ago
        > you can get both in Lisp if you want The whole point of benefiting from immutable data structures is their ubiquity. If they're something you reach for only when you personally decide you need them, they're unlikely to work well with 3rd-party code; you will have to do a lot more digging to understand how the code you're writing will behave in a concurrent context vs having it be obvious. Making it opt-in is almost making it pointless, unless you never use 3rd-party code.
      • catnaroek 10y ago
        Is it possible to make truly persistent data structures in Lisp, rather than just persistent by convention? Here are some benefits that you can only get if the language implementation knows your data structures are immutable: (0) The compiler can automatically perform optimizations like fusing small nodes and hash consing. (1) The garbage collector can take advantage of the fact that traversing (the immutable portion of) the heap sequentially produces a topological sorting of the object graph.
  • dkersten 10y ago
    recur I actually really like recur because it signifies intent. It tells the future-me that I intended for this function to be tail recursive (ie, it not being tail-recursive should be considered an error).
    • wtetzner 10y ago
      It does, but it's still too weak, e.g. it only works if the function is calling itself.
• tsm 10y ago
  Not the GP, but for quick things I prefer CL because: * TIMTOWTDI. Doing everything with map/reduce/filter is great, but sometimes it's more direct to just use the LOOP macro. Immutability is great, but sometimes it's way faster to just SETF something (and not have to worry about atoms). * Batteries (more) included. IME, I find myself needing to use third-party libraries sooner with Clojure than with CL. Also, QuickLisp is arguably faster to get rolling with than Leiningen (I've found it easier to get the new library into my existing lisp image). And CL tends to have clusters of functions that do similar-but-different things, whereas Clojure puts the cognitive burden on you to do things right (example off the top of my head: CL has REMOVE, REMOVE-IF, and REMOVE-IF-NOT, Clojure has ????? (like ten different ways, I'm serious), `(filter pred list)`, and `(filter (complement pred) list)`). * The debugging situation is fantastic. Both because CL deals with errors a lot more gracefully than Clojure (are we allowed to blame the JVM?) and because SLIME >>> CIDER, at least for now.
  • gyim 10y ago
    I haven't used the LOOP macro in CL, but the for macro in Clojure is also very powerful and (imho) very readable. My take on the 'versify' example in 4 lines: (for [book book-order chapter (range 1 1000) :when (get-in bible [book (str chapter)]) verse (range 1 1000) :when (get-in bible [book (str chapter) (str verse)])] [book chapter verse (get-in bible [book (str chapter) (str verse)])]) Notice that a single "for" can iterate in a multi-level structure. You can also use :let if you don't want to call (get-in) multiple times (which makes the code shorter, but more redundant and less efficient)
    • shiro 10y ago
      I use CL/Scheme/Clojure at work. I generally prefer comprehension style ('for' in Clojure, srfi-42 in Scheme) but sometimes CL's loop let me save a few nestings. One of such patterns is when I have to accumulate multiple kind of things while I zip through the input. Somewhat contrived example: You have a hashtable that maps integer key to a list of strings. You want to scan it just once and build two lists, strings associated with odd keys and strings associated with even keys. ;; populate input (defvar input (make-hash-table :test 'eql)) (setf (gethash 1 input) '("ichi" "hi")) (setf (gethash 2 input) '("ni" "fu")) (setf (gethash 3 input) '("san" "mi")) (setf (gethash 4 input) '("yon" "shi" "yo")) (setf (gethash 5 input) '("go" "itsu")) ;; loop (loop for k being each hash-key in input when (oddp k) append (gethash k input) into odds when (evenp k) append (gethash k input) into evens finally (return (values odds evens))) ; => ("go" "itsu" "san" "mi" "ichi" "hi") and ("yon" "shi" "yo" "ni" "fu")