

Rich Hickey's Keynote from the JVM Languages Summit (video) - sharksandwich
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey

======
va_coder
I admire Rich Hickey and Stuart Halloway and I've been reading the prag
programmer book on Clojure, but I still haven't been able to wrap my head
around why I should replace my preferred language - Ruby - with Clojure.

I understand that if I was building a database, or a traffic control system or
something with lots of concurrency, it's useful.

But if I'm building a web app, the appserver and database handle the
concurrency issues for me.

So I haven't quite understood why Clojure is so important.

~~~
rads
Clojure is important because it's a Lisp that runs on the JVM and uses
existing Java libraries. It has taken big steps to improve Lisp's
accessibility.

Do you like Lisp? If you like Lisp, Clojure is its most pragmatic dialect. I
personally enjoy the simple, consistent syntax and functional programming
style that Ruby lacks.

Note that while Clojure was designed with concurrency in mind, it's also good
at other things — like Ruby, it's a general purpose language. However, you're
going to be more productive writing a web app with Ruby right now because
there are no libraries for Clojure that are as robust as Rails. That may
change as Clojure's ecosystem grows.

~~~
dkersten
Its more a case of _do you understand lisp_ , because it seems to me that few
people who really understand it actually dislike it, while most people who
don't understand it seem to dislike it (parentheses and prefix notation being
the two things people seem to hate most). Its difficult to explain the
benefits of Lisp to someone who doesn't already understand Lisp...

------
tsuraan
A bit off-topic, but I've been seeing more infoq lately, and I'm wondering if
there's a pwnyoutube/deturl type thing for infoq. I found the conclusion to
Rich's talk on youtube, but it looked like it was filmed with a cell phone and
it was only the last few minutes of the talk. Any pointers to a download link
would be much appreciated.

