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What an unfortunate name. Perhaps, in the confusion, it will help to actually promote Rich Hickey's wonderful work.
by rbarr 17y ago
What an unfortunate name. Perhaps, in the confusion, it will help to actually promote Rich Hickey's wonderful work.
- bockris 17y agoI'm with you. I totally read Closure as Clojure.
- freakwit 17y agoI totally read read as read.
- frognibble 17y agoIt was called Closure before Rich announced Clojure to the world.
- flatline 17y ago"Closure" being a general concept in programming, I always disliked the name "Clojure". Same thing as Google Chrome, everyone is now confused when you talk about browser chrome as a general thing.
- yason 17y agoNaming is a pretty powerful thing. If you name your crap with regular nouns, what's left for others there? Like, suppose you build a crappy GUI system and just dub everything based on simple self-describing words such as windows, word, notepad, internet explorer, you might end up wildly successful yet for reasons other than technical superiority.
- jriddycuz 17y agoI agree that "Clojure" is kinda a silly name, but what else are you gonna call it? I assume Henly wanted a name that conveyed its functional and/or Lisp roots, and the fact that it's on the JVM. Let's try some names using the usual JVM language conventions: JLisp works, but it's boring, and Jisp sounds kinda suspect. Parenjases is just silly. Or maybe LLBeans for "lazy lisp beans"...but that's just getting too cute. I think I probably would have gone with Jambda.
- logicalmind 17y agoIn case people are wondering, here is how the Clojure name came about: "Clojure is pronounced the same as the word "closure". The creator of the language, Rich Hickey, explains the name this way: "I wanted to involve C (C#), L (Lisp) and J (Java). Once I came up with Clojure, given the pun on closure, the available domains and vast emptiness of the googlespace, it was an easy decision."" At least this is how it is outlined in this document: http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html
- adriand 17y ago"what else are you gonna call it?" How about "Armadillo"?
- oliverkofoed 17y agoYears ago, i wrote a compressor for javascript. I called it "Arnold" because it was strong and squeezed javascript into a smaller shape.
- ynniv 17y agoThats a terrible argument... He did indeed "announce Clojure to the world" before Google did, and now we all associate the phonetic name with him. Treat "closure" as a project name and pick a different product name, Google.
- s3graham 17y agoWhat about http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html? I believe it was Clozure before Clojure was released (but I could be wrong).
- mahmud 17y agoHow about the Closure web browser which predates both Clozure and Clojure? http://www.cliki.net/Closure http://www.cliki.net/Closure
- gojomo 17y agoEven without the near-collision with 'Clojure', the full-collision with the 'closure' concept is problematic. They should prepend or append a 'G' or 'JS' for clarity (to both humans and indexers). EG: GClosure, JSClosure, ClosureG, or ClosureJS
- notaddicted 17y agoI'm getting disillusioned with software naming. Everyone wants a cool name that's fun to say, but all the names mean other things too, and quite a few don't describe the project very well.
- petercooper 17y agoDespite the closeness in name, aren't they pronounced differently? I've always pronounced "Clojure" with a hard "j," rather than like "closure." Edit: Turns out soft "j" is order of the day, there's a whole discussion about it: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/e2e0f178e4bca706 http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/... - so confusion can continue to reign ;-)
- jimbokun 17y ago"Clozure" is taken as well. http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html Any other consonants that can be shoe-horned into that slot?
- bokchoi 17y agoClo-de-jour?
- Confusion 17y agoI think most of the intended audience will not find 'Closure' confusing, because they are unaware of the concept that already has that name. The overlap of people interested in Clojure and people interested in Closure is rather small.
- caffeine 17y agoThe overlap of people interested in Clojure and people interested in Closure is rather small. This entire thread is evidence against that point.
- jamesbritt 17y ago"I think most of the intended audience will not find 'Closure' confusing, because they are unaware of the concept that already has that name." Pretty sad to expect that so many people working with JavaScript will not know what a closure is. Not that you're wrong; I honestly don't know, but would hope things aren't so bad.
- Sandman 17y agoThis is indeed an unfortunate name. The word 'closure' was, at first, used to describe a concept in programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science). Then Clozure and Clojure came along. Now, I can see how these two are related to the aforementioned concept, but I simply can't see what these 'Closure tools' have to do with the concept of closures. Yet the name would suggest that they do. Is there anybody from Google that would care to explain?
- Elfan 17y agoNote that the word closure has meaning in set theory and other areas of mathematics relevant to computer science. SICP explicitly avoids using what wikipedia calls a 'computer science closure' for this reason.
- blasdel 17y agoIt's not quite as bad as PrototypeJS -- the most ironically named library ever. The whole point of it is to force Class-based bullshit onto the only pure Prototype-based language anyone uses. It's named after the concept it's designed explicitly to stamp out. So depressing.
- mkramlich 17y agoDepressing? Don't talk to me about depressing. I'll be over in the corner rusting for the next nine million years. -- Marvin
- aboodman 17y agoPicking a name for a software project is one of the few areas where a developer gets to kick loose and be completely creative, and even fanciful. Personally, I love picking names that recast old words in a new way, and think Closure is a great name for this project.
- caffeine 17y agoWhy is it called Closure? Does it close stuff? Does it pass functions and bindings? What could possibly have inspired them to use this particular name?
- jurjenh 17y agoI suspect the confusion will only affect people that don't need the specific implementations... People that want Closure for their JS goodness will know which it is, similarly for Clojure and Clozure lisps. And I generally search out new tools by description rather than name, so the naming issue becomes more of a marketing issue than anything else, and given the name space, it does seem a relatively hot area at the moment... At least they didn't go for something like GJST...