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I feel like the author didn't do this as a way to bash Clojure but to try and progress Common Lisp. Anecdotally, I remember Hickey saying something about a stag

by zengid 10y ago

I feel like the author didn't do this as a way to bash Clojure but to try and progress Common Lisp. Anecdotally, I remember Hickey saying something about a stagnation in the CL community, so if Clojure inspires cross-pollination of ideas then that's a good thing. For instance, Simon Peyton Jones describes [1] how they took the ideas around STM from 'unsafe' languages and put it into Haskell, developed it further, and then later the 'unsafe' languages took the Haskell innovations and put it back into their languages. Clojure isn't perfect, and Common Lisp isn't perfect, but hey, they're better than programming in assembly. We should be stoked about someone trying to innovate; why do these posts always turn into language wars? [1] https://youtu.be/iSmkqocn0oQ https://youtu.be/iSmkqocn0oQ around 3:50, but the video is short so it's worth watching the whole thing.

brudgers 10y ago
I didn't take it as Clojure bashing either. On the other hand, it does seem to be a sort of back-footed defense of Common Lisp, to me. Partially because it seems to miss acknowledgement that part of the goal of Clojure was to bring the level of abstraction that Common Lisp affords to the JVM, for example Common Lisp has the abstraction of Seq(uences) and functions that operate upon them. But the big elephant to me is that Common Lisp provides a very strong set of Von Neumann abstractions in addition to its functional abstractions. Lists are an abstraction that maps to sequential reads of a contiguous block of memory. Setf has pointer and offset semantics. And the much maligned `loop` is a brilliant abstraction over iteration that lets a program be explicit about the why of a loop. That's not to say there are not advantages to functional programming. But the popularity of Go and Python etc. suggest that abstractions that run counter to functional programming mores is not a reason to find fault in Common Lisp. Like Clojure, it's a big language that tries to meet programmers where they are in the projects that they work on. Nobody faults Clojure for allowing Java's mutable vectors because they're there in the language for practical reasons.

by zengid 10y ago

brudgers 10y ago

I didn't take it as Clojure bashing either. On the other hand, it does seem to be a sort of back-footed defense of Common Lisp, to me. Partially because it seems to miss acknowledgement that part of the goal of Clojure was to bring the level of abstraction that Common Lisp affords to the JVM, for example Common Lisp has the abstraction of Seq(uences) and functions that operate upon them. But the big elephant to me is that Common Lisp provides a very strong set of Von Neumann abstractions in addition to its functional abstractions. Lists are an abstraction that maps to sequential reads of a contiguous block of memory. Setf has pointer and offset semantics. And the much maligned `loop` is a brilliant abstraction over iteration that lets a program be explicit about the why of a loop. That's not to say there are not advantages to functional programming. But the popularity of Go and Python etc. suggest that abstractions that run counter to functional programming mores is not a reason to find fault in Common Lisp. Like Clojure, it's a big language that tries to meet programmers where they are in the projects that they work on. Nobody faults Clojure for allowing Java's mutable vectors because they're there in the language for practical reasons.