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Closure is weird if you’re not already into lisps (I know, I know our fathers’ parentheses). It’s not easy to just pick up and start solving problems, because

Closure is weird if you’re not already into lisps (I know, I know our fathers’ parentheses). It’s not easy to just pick up and start solving problems, because everything feels foreign. I don’t know if it’s dead or not, as I’m sure people still love to use it… it just doesn’t have any major upside that’d make me want to adopt it. Rust, as you’ve mentioned, is the opposite… huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt, so no surprise it’s getting more talk these days.

cutler 4y ago
I managed to avoid being OOP-ed at the beginning of my programming career when I discovered "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl and "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall. It was a close call as I shared a house with a Java programmer who swore Java was the future. Perl was much cooler so I stayed with it and when Clojure appeared it was that much easier to learn, not having to de-OOP myself.
capableweb 4y ago
> [Clojure is] not easy to just pick up and start solving problems > [Rust has] huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt Probably this depends wildly on the person, but I found the opposite to be true. I had bunch of languages under my belt before I learned Clojure, but none of them functional nor s-expressions, so Clojure was very different than the ones I knew. Took some while to get used to, but after a couple of months I was more efficient than I ever was in any other language. On the other hand, Rust took longer time to be as efficient as other languages I knew, even though it was on the surface more similar to what I knew since before. So for me personally, it was easier to become efficient with Clojure, even with 0 experience with lisps or the JVM, compared to Rust. I think it's mostly about the surface-area of what you can learn to become efficient. Once you understand s-expressions, there is not much to Clojure, besides memorizing various APIs, but that's easy. With Rust, there is so much syntax to remember, and other rules to follow, while in Clojure the syntax is really simple, so once you get it, you will never fight with what the right syntax is again.
yenda 4y ago
The lisp syntax was my original reason to accept Clojure. You might need a few days to get used to it, but it is far less than any other syntax, and it quickly falls into your muscle memory in a way no other syntax can. Within weeks you master a handful of basic parens manipulation that are all you need to edit and navigate code. That means that you are 100% focus on implementing your solution to a problem instead of switching between doing that and crafting your solution into an alien syntax, assisted by an ide

cutler 4y ago

I managed to avoid being OOP-ed at the beginning of my programming career when I discovered "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl and "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall. It was a close call as I shared a house with a Java programmer who swore Java was the future. Perl was much cooler so I stayed with it and when Clojure appeared it was that much easier to learn, not having to de-OOP myself.

capableweb 4y ago

> [Clojure is] not easy to just pick up and start solving problems > [Rust has] huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt Probably this depends wildly on the person, but I found the opposite to be true. I had bunch of languages under my belt before I learned Clojure, but none of them functional nor s-expressions, so Clojure was very different than the ones I knew. Took some while to get used to, but after a couple of months I was more efficient than I ever was in any other language. On the other hand, Rust took longer time to be as efficient as other languages I knew, even though it was on the surface more similar to what I knew since before. So for me personally, it was easier to become efficient with Clojure, even with 0 experience with lisps or the JVM, compared to Rust. I think it's mostly about the surface-area of what you can learn to become efficient. Once you understand s-expressions, there is not much to Clojure, besides memorizing various APIs, but that's easy. With Rust, there is so much syntax to remember, and other rules to follow, while in Clojure the syntax is really simple, so once you get it, you will never fight with what the right syntax is again.

yenda 4y ago

The lisp syntax was my original reason to accept Clojure. You might need a few days to get used to it, but it is far less than any other syntax, and it quickly falls into your muscle memory in a way no other syntax can. Within weeks you master a handful of basic parens manipulation that are all you need to edit and navigate code. That means that you are 100% focus on implementing your solution to a problem instead of switching between doing that and crafting your solution into an alien syntax, assisted by an ide