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> Clojure's main shtick (at least its main influence on me) is a combination of image-oriented programming (that is a live REPL that lets you edit a program you

by lvh 6y ago

> Clojure's main shtick (at least its main influence on me) is a combination of image-oriented programming (that is a live REPL that lets you edit a program you're writing on the fly without needing to restart the program) with a strong distrust of any abstractions that extend beyond immutable collections (Clojure's mantra of focusing on data). With you there. > While Clojure transients are a fascinating tool and derived from its implementation of immutable data structures, otherwise its immutable data structures are roughly in the same ballpark as other languages. The immutability was genuinely innovative though. It's true other languages had immutable data structures. But Clojure's hash-mapped tries were genuinely new and a massive performance improvement that made "just make everything immutable all of the time" feasible and not just a giant exercise in copying (that you hope the compiler is smart enough to work around). > Then you had other languages with the former, such as Smalltalk and Common Lisp. But those two languages never really treated immutable collections as essentially the end-all-be-all of abstractions (certainly not Smalltalk where the idea of independent data is almost antithetical to its premise!). This is definitely an exaggeration; Clojure does have facilities for other abstractions and being an FP language it certainly has higher-order functions, but the community shies away from those as much as possible. Perhaps I'm misreading you here. Clojure does focus on data, but the community shying away from things like higher-order functions?! No, I don't think people shy away from map, filter, reduce, or transducers, or update, or... and all of those are HOFs. Can you elaborate? If you mean like "complex type-like hierarchies" then yes, nobody really uses those, but HOFs specifically?

dwohnitmok 6y ago
RE HAMTs that's sort of true. Transients are a real leap forward that the FP community didn't have before (things like Haskell's ST generally require at least one full copy of an immutable data structure into a mutable one). Clojure's choice of dedicated syntax for each of its main data structures is also an interesting ergonomic choice (which sadly few languages have chosen to copy). However the presence of a commonly available vector-like data structure (a data structure with logarithmic or better cons, snoc, and indexing) is not new. For example Haskell's vector-like Data.Sequence predates Clojure (as does its Patrica Trie and Map implementations). RE higher-order functions I was being imprecise. I meant user-defined higher order functions. It's very common to use higher order functions, but it's rather uncommon to define your own new ones. Incidentally, I think Clojure transducers are one instance where they've used a higher order function when a first order function would do. It turns out that transducers can be implemented as functions of the form `a -> List b` rather than the usual presentation as a higher order function on reducers. Yes even though there's a List it works on non-collection things.

by lvh 6y ago

dwohnitmok 6y ago

RE HAMTs that's sort of true. Transients are a real leap forward that the FP community didn't have before (things like Haskell's ST generally require at least one full copy of an immutable data structure into a mutable one). Clojure's choice of dedicated syntax for each of its main data structures is also an interesting ergonomic choice (which sadly few languages have chosen to copy). However the presence of a commonly available vector-like data structure (a data structure with logarithmic or better cons, snoc, and indexing) is not new. For example Haskell's vector-like Data.Sequence predates Clojure (as does its Patrica Trie and Map implementations). RE higher-order functions I was being imprecise. I meant user-defined higher order functions. It's very common to use higher order functions, but it's rather uncommon to define your own new ones. Incidentally, I think Clojure transducers are one instance where they've used a higher order function when a first order function would do. It turns out that transducers can be implemented as functions of the form `a -> List b` rather than the usual presentation as a higher order function on reducers. Yes even though there's a List it works on non-collection things.