
My disillusionment with Clojure and Lisps - tosh
https://medium.com/@boxed/my-disillusionment-with-clojure-and-lisps-9eca38ab7f0c
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sova
I would say play with LightTable and fall in love with the REPL which is what
programming is at its core. These are not new notions (lisp and all that) but
they are wholly undervalued tools by a generation that grew up making
computers from the perspective of assembly, registers, and chips, instead of
from the purely "human interacting with software" perspective.

There is absolutely no program that cannot be made possible through lisp, and
yes, one may think that certain programs are easier to code in "alternative"
languages that are dominant today, such as Java and whatnot, but in reality
there is a lot of "hidden complexity" using todays dominant tools because they
take not into account the basic breakthroughs of such early and wonderful
structures as Lisp. (a la McCarthy)

How many times is a student asked to show to to implement a linked list? You'd
think this is a datatype that has proven incredibly useful over the years, and
yet here we are doing the same exercise and pouring countless human-hours into
something that should come as the default.

I think it's just a bias that will erode over time, Clojure is beautiful (it
is a frankenstein of ideas) but the beauty is not in the fact that its
_possible_ ... the beauty lies in the fact that it will outlive and outlast
the rest, because it lives beyond architecture.

/le rant

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innocentoldguy
I disagree with the author's commentary (in his follow-up article) that
Clojure is the best place to dive into functional programming. I think Elm and
Elixir are both better options, since they both have cleaner and easier to
understand syntax. I also think hot deployments in Elixir, using Exrm, are
much nicer than anything in the JVM world. Finally, I like that memory is
private in BEAM, unlike the JVM, where it is shared.

~~~
iLemming
Elm is still somewhat "experimental" and the popular opinion is that Elm is
nothing but a paved road to Purescript - which in turn has it's own steep
learning curve. Also FFI to Javascript in Elm, Purescript, Fay or GHCJS isn't
as smooth as it's with Clojurescript. Sharing code between back-end written in
Clojure and front-end written in Clojurscript is a real thing and not some
kind of myth. "Cleaner and easier to understand syntax" is very debatable,
seasoned Lispers won't trade the power of symbolic expressions for anything
else, because nothing is more cleaner, concise and readable than the code
expressed in its pure, unambiguous form.

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eternalban
on second thought: [https://medium.com/@boxed/followup-to-my-disillusionment-
wit...](https://medium.com/@boxed/followup-to-my-disillusionment-with-clojure-
and-lisps-49d8b0ec94c1#.6y4cpuccs)

~~~
shakna
> I am more positive towards Clojure now than before publishing the article.
> I’ll definitely try to reduce my exposure to reddit comments a bit :P

It's fantastic to see someone complain, and then see that what they wanted
does exist.

Hopefully the Clojure community isn't all stuck with Reddit, that more and
more seems to only just be slightly less toxic than 4chan, though exceptions
exist on both platforms.

Because Clojure, though what I think of as a franken-LISP, is beautiful,
powerful, and damn good at what it sets out to do.

~~~
tosh
I personally found the Clojure community very welcoming at conferences,
meetups as well as on the mailing list, slack, stackoverflow and on reddit.

