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Author of linked article speaking. I dislike Clojure because it is a cheap knock-off of Common Lisp, with no upsides that I'm aware of - besides trendiness. Th

Author of linked article speaking. I dislike Clojure because it is a cheap knock-off of Common Lisp, with no upsides that I'm aware of - besides trendiness. The article mentions one serious flaw - Clojure barfs Java stack traces, instead of serious debug information (the way Common Lisp does - with restarts, etc.) Another flaw is the lack of reader macros. But what is the point of listing said flaws? I could go on and on, and no one will care a whit. Why? Because Clojure is a product of immature minds who piss on the past work of serious people (the Common Lisp community) simply for the sake of faux-novelty. In this, it resembles Newlisp and other backwards steps disguised as progress. It is, in fact, best understood as yet another product of the idiotic language-of-the-day mentality which gave us Dylan, Python, Ruby, and the many other shoddy "infix Lisps." > hates all languages that aren't the Symbolics flavour of common lisp This is patently untrue, as anyone who actually bothers to read my articles knows well. Symbolics (or rather, the MIT Lisp machine architecture their products were based on) was simply an example of a Lisp system done well. Clojure, a thin veneer on the Java cesspool, is not. To run with your analogy, I am a lover of steak, who is upset by tofu peddlers' success in passing off their cheap trash as real meat.

deleted 14y ago
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Xcelerate 14y ago
"Astonishing" is exactly what I was thinking of as well. There's a lot of vitriol in this post. You say that you could go on and on and no one would care. But that's not true. If you list good, logical arguments against something, people will listen. Instead, there's an almost instinctive urge to rebel against your points solely because of your post's tone, which is antagonistic to what I assume is your goal. In my opinion, Clojure doesn't try to one-up Lisp. Rich Hickey recognizes the great value of Lisp and wants to share these features with a wider audience -- I can't say I would have ever taken an interest in Lisp if it weren't for Clojure in fact. Check out Clojure's rationale page (http://clojure.org/rationale http://clojure.org/rationale). Rich says he wanted a language that is: *A Lisp *for Functional Programming *symbiotic with an established Platform *designed for Concurrency And he says he couldn't find one. That's not a subjective statement -- there wasn't a language with all those features before Clojure. And I'll bet there's a lot of people that want those four things. His language does that very well. That doesn't mean it should be used for everything, but he never implied it that anyway -- quite to the contrary, he explicitly points out the problem domain that Clojure addresses. I think you misunderstand the designers of these new languages. Most of them aren't trying to make something "trendy" (that should be obvious by how many esoteric hobby languages there are). They are trying to solve problems. And if some people other than the author of the language can get some use along the way, well then that's just great. Clojure isn't the product of "immature minds" either. It's the product of one mind, and one that's spent many years thinking about good language design and many years working with software in industry.
dxbydt 14y ago
> Symbolics...was simply an example of a Lisp system done well Gratuitous reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80662 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80662 (checkout pg's first comment on that post ) Symbolics was the future. CS has in many ways regressed since then, mostly because of the stupendous success of worse-is-better unix/c mindset coupled with lack of DARPA funding ,the AI winter & the rise of cheap wintel cpu's. At Goldman Sachs, I was incredibly fortunate to work alongside one of the original Symbolics guys ( listed here: http://www.asl.dsl.pipex.com/symbolics/legacy.html http://www.asl.dsl.pipex.com/symbolics/legacy.html ). He complained long and hard about how the c/c++/java family of PLs were "absolute shit" and OOP was doomed from the get go and why functional will be back someday. This was back in the 1999-2000 timeframe when Sun was in the driver's seat and everywhere you looked, it was OOP or bust. Now, ten years hence, functional is all the rage, and you've got clojure, functional java, scala, several functional JS libs...all that's old is new once again! Who knows, with all this VC $$$ searching for a home, we might actually see the resurgence of a LISP Machine. Symbolics 2.0 FTW!!!
cageface 14y ago
Thanks for reminding me why I gave up on the CL community in 2003. You just can't talk to people who are this religiously certain they are right.
Rastafarian 14y ago
I'm about to start a small hobby web project. What Lisp platform would you recommend? I'm somewhat scared of stories like Reddit's - Lisp being a great language, but implementations having problems with Unicode, threads, networking, scaling, price, etc.
- asciilifeform 14y ago
  Hunchentoot (http://weitz.de/hunchentoot http://weitz.de/hunchentoot) on SBCL (http://sbcl.org http://sbcl.org). It works. 100% free.
  - zatara 14y ago
    I remember your comments from some time ago, where you described Mathematica as a good Lisp-like language with good development tools. I am also curious about Mathematica. Have you changed your mind? Why?
    - asciilifeform 14y ago
      Excellent question. See this thread on my site, the story of how I kicked the Mathematica habit: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42&cpage=1#comment-2746 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42&cpage=1#comment-2746
      - zatara 14y ago
        Amazing insight, thanks.
  - Rastafarian 14y ago
    Thanks a lot, I'll give them a try. What tool do people use to write Lisp Web code? Is it GNU Emacs or something else? How compatible are Emacs List and SBCL?
    - asciilifeform 14y ago
      Emacs with SLIME (http://common-lisp.net/project/slime http://common-lisp.net/project/slime).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Xcelerate 14y ago

"Astonishing" is exactly what I was thinking of as well. There's a lot of vitriol in this post. You say that you could go on and on and no one would care. But that's not true. If you list good, logical arguments against something, people will listen. Instead, there's an almost instinctive urge to rebel against your points solely because of your post's tone, which is antagonistic to what I assume is your goal. In my opinion, Clojure doesn't try to one-up Lisp. Rich Hickey recognizes the great value of Lisp and wants to share these features with a wider audience -- I can't say I would have ever taken an interest in Lisp if it weren't for Clojure in fact. Check out Clojure's rationale page (http://clojure.org/rationale http://clojure.org/rationale). Rich says he wanted a language that is: *A Lisp *for Functional Programming *symbiotic with an established Platform *designed for Concurrency And he says he couldn't find one. That's not a subjective statement -- there wasn't a language with all those features before Clojure. And I'll bet there's a lot of people that want those four things. His language does that very well. That doesn't mean it should be used for everything, but he never implied it that anyway -- quite to the contrary, he explicitly points out the problem domain that Clojure addresses. I think you misunderstand the designers of these new languages. Most of them aren't trying to make something "trendy" (that should be obvious by how many esoteric hobby languages there are). They are trying to solve problems. And if some people other than the author of the language can get some use along the way, well then that's just great. Clojure isn't the product of "immature minds" either. It's the product of one mind, and one that's spent many years thinking about good language design and many years working with software in industry.

dxbydt 14y ago

> Symbolics...was simply an example of a Lisp system done well Gratuitous reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80662 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80662 (checkout pg's first comment on that post ) Symbolics was the future. CS has in many ways regressed since then, mostly because of the stupendous success of worse-is-better unix/c mindset coupled with lack of DARPA funding ,the AI winter & the rise of cheap wintel cpu's. At Goldman Sachs, I was incredibly fortunate to work alongside one of the original Symbolics guys ( listed here: http://www.asl.dsl.pipex.com/symbolics/legacy.html http://www.asl.dsl.pipex.com/symbolics/legacy.html ). He complained long and hard about how the c/c++/java family of PLs were "absolute shit" and OOP was doomed from the get go and why functional will be back someday. This was back in the 1999-2000 timeframe when Sun was in the driver's seat and everywhere you looked, it was OOP or bust. Now, ten years hence, functional is all the rage, and you've got clojure, functional java, scala, several functional JS libs...all that's old is new once again! Who knows, with all this VC $$$ searching for a home, we might actually see the resurgence of a LISP Machine. Symbolics 2.0 FTW!!!

cageface 14y ago

Thanks for reminding me why I gave up on the CL community in 2003. You just can't talk to people who are this religiously certain they are right.

Rastafarian 14y ago

I'm about to start a small hobby web project. What Lisp platform would you recommend? I'm somewhat scared of stories like Reddit's - Lisp being a great language, but implementations having problems with Unicode, threads, networking, scaling, price, etc.

asciilifeform 14y ago
Hunchentoot (http://weitz.de/hunchentoot http://weitz.de/hunchentoot) on SBCL (http://sbcl.org http://sbcl.org). It works. 100% free.
- zatara 14y ago
  I remember your comments from some time ago, where you described Mathematica as a good Lisp-like language with good development tools. I am also curious about Mathematica. Have you changed your mind? Why?
  - asciilifeform 14y ago
    Excellent question. See this thread on my site, the story of how I kicked the Mathematica habit: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42&cpage=1#comment-2746 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42&cpage=1#comment-2746
    - zatara 14y ago
      Amazing insight, thanks.
- Rastafarian 14y ago
  Thanks a lot, I'll give them a try. What tool do people use to write Lisp Web code? Is it GNU Emacs or something else? How compatible are Emacs List and SBCL?
  - asciilifeform 14y ago
    Emacs with SLIME (http://common-lisp.net/project/slime http://common-lisp.net/project/slime).