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Considering it took you that long to be a Lisp convert, I like to know more on how you came to the see the light. I’ve been doing coding for over 15 years, too.

Considering it took you that long to be a Lisp convert, I like to know more on how you came to the see the light. I’ve been doing coding for over 15 years, too. And, every time I tried to pick up a Lisp dialect (Clojure was the last) I couldn’t help but wonder what with all the buzz about this. I really wish that I could see the light someday, though.

lkrubner 7y ago
Depends where you are coming from. What languages do you work in now? If the language you are working in now has excellent support for concurrency, then that part of Clojure is not going to impress you. Or if you currently work with a language that makes it easy to write DSLs, then that part of Clojure won't impress you.
- mrbonner 7y ago
  Mostly in Java and now picking up Rust in my spare time.
ypcx 7y ago
I wish I had a good answer to this. I suppose I've never looked at anything else than what I was working with (C, C++, Java, JavaScript and much later CoffeeScript) out of "religious" reasons. I guess being really good at what you do can do that to you. I hold CoffeeScript in a very high regard. It has freed me from two things - the spaghetti verbosity of JavaScript, and the abrupt syntax changes of ECMA spec introduced in the recent versions, ones I don't particularly see as a positive development of the language, _especially_ compared to the timeless cleanliness of CoffeeScript. So and I think that CoffeeScript may have thawed me a little towards LISP-like syntax and behavior. I don't know. I think at some point, you realize that you have written (and managed) enough of C/Java-like verbose code and that it's time to try something completely different. So and then it hits you - programming should be data-centric, not language-construct-centric. And that a too big codebase must be a result of ill-specified project scope, more often than not.

lkrubner 7y ago

Depends where you are coming from. What languages do you work in now? If the language you are working in now has excellent support for concurrency, then that part of Clojure is not going to impress you. Or if you currently work with a language that makes it easy to write DSLs, then that part of Clojure won't impress you.

mrbonner 7y ago
Mostly in Java and now picking up Rust in my spare time.

ypcx 7y ago

I wish I had a good answer to this. I suppose I've never looked at anything else than what I was working with (C, C++, Java, JavaScript and much later CoffeeScript) out of "religious" reasons. I guess being really good at what you do can do that to you. I hold CoffeeScript in a very high regard. It has freed me from two things - the spaghetti verbosity of JavaScript, and the abrupt syntax changes of ECMA spec introduced in the recent versions, ones I don't particularly see as a positive development of the language, _especially_ compared to the timeless cleanliness of CoffeeScript. So and I think that CoffeeScript may have thawed me a little towards LISP-like syntax and behavior. I don't know. I think at some point, you realize that you have written (and managed) enough of C/Java-like verbose code and that it's time to try something completely different. So and then it hits you - programming should be data-centric, not language-construct-centric. And that a too big codebase must be a result of ill-specified project scope, more often than not.