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Do you prefer it over Clojure? If yes why? I'm a bit versed with Clojure but sometimes I feel that it is not a true lisp.

by edem 10y ago

cutler 10y ago
Much as I love Clojure I find the list vs seq abstraction goes against the lisp tradition.
- brudgers 10y ago
  Common Lisp has a sequence type that includes lists and vectors (and because strings are vectors, strings). Ordinary functions like sort, remove, find, reverse, and length operate on them. Clojure's seq extends the abstraction to include maps and sets and other types implementing the interface.
pnathan 10y ago
Yes. Clojure often feels like a skin over Java; an ergonomic library. Most visibly this is manifested in stack traces. Clojure also wants to compile files, rather than read them. There are good ideas in Clojure, but they lie around the parallelism abstractions, not around the implementation. Socially, of course, the JVM has a huge mindshare.
cronjobber 10y ago
> sometimes I feel that it is not a true lisp. That feeling may be the result of some questionable syntactic design decisions in Clojure. Hickey went over Lisp syntax and tried to remove parentheses wherever possible. (It was the hip thing, PG's Arc did it, too, which may be where Hickey got it from.) As a result, you get a sub-par editing experience —generic sexp-based structure editing doesn't get you as far as with a Lisp— and diminished readability once you get above three omitted pairs of parentheses in a row. On the other hand, Clojure arbitrarily mandates a secondary kind of list literal in some places of the syntax, again making Clojure harder to write and edit. I don't even see a readability benefit, but of course YMMV. TL;DR: Clojure syntax is a "complected" derivative of Lisp :-)
- edem 10y ago
  So you seen that video? Great talk though.
- joe-user 10y ago
  > you get a sub-par editing experience [in Clojure] Paredit and vim-sexp have no problem doing structural editing. I don't use it myself, but Parinfer was created with Clojure in mind and people seem incredibly happy with it. > diminished readability [in Clojure] If you watched the talk that you lifted "complected" from, you'd know that this is subjective. Is German unreadable because I don't know German? > Clojure syntax is a "complected" derivative of Lisp :-) Complected in some ways sure, but far less so than many lisps, and certainly less so than Common Lisp. It seems your familiarity is complected with your reasoning.

Do you prefer it over Clojure? If yes why? I'm a bit versed with Clojure but sometimes I feel that it is not a true lisp.

by edem 10y ago

Do you prefer it over Clojure? If yes why? I'm a bit versed with Clojure but sometimes I feel that it is not a true lisp.

cutler 10y ago

Much as I love Clojure I find the list vs seq abstraction goes against the lisp tradition.

brudgers 10y ago
Common Lisp has a sequence type that includes lists and vectors (and because strings are vectors, strings). Ordinary functions like sort, remove, find, reverse, and length operate on them. Clojure's seq extends the abstraction to include maps and sets and other types implementing the interface.

pnathan 10y ago

Yes. Clojure often feels like a skin over Java; an ergonomic library. Most visibly this is manifested in stack traces. Clojure also wants to compile files, rather than read them. There are good ideas in Clojure, but they lie around the parallelism abstractions, not around the implementation. Socially, of course, the JVM has a huge mindshare.

cronjobber 10y ago

> sometimes I feel that it is not a true lisp. That feeling may be the result of some questionable syntactic design decisions in Clojure. Hickey went over Lisp syntax and tried to remove parentheses wherever possible. (It was the hip thing, PG's Arc did it, too, which may be where Hickey got it from.) As a result, you get a sub-par editing experience —generic sexp-based structure editing doesn't get you as far as with a Lisp— and diminished readability once you get above three omitted pairs of parentheses in a row. On the other hand, Clojure arbitrarily mandates a secondary kind of list literal in some places of the syntax, again making Clojure harder to write and edit. I don't even see a readability benefit, but of course YMMV. TL;DR: Clojure syntax is a "complected" derivative of Lisp :-)

edem 10y ago
So you seen that video? Great talk though.
joe-user 10y ago
> you get a sub-par editing experience [in Clojure] Paredit and vim-sexp have no problem doing structural editing. I don't use it myself, but Parinfer was created with Clojure in mind and people seem incredibly happy with it. > diminished readability [in Clojure] If you watched the talk that you lifted "complected" from, you'd know that this is subjective. Is German unreadable because I don't know German? > Clojure syntax is a "complected" derivative of Lisp :-) Complected in some ways sure, but far less so than many lisps, and certainly less so than Common Lisp. It seems your familiarity is complected with your reasoning.