

[Ask HN] Is clojure really a modern lisp? - morphir

It usually ends up being the lisp we point newbies towards. Wouldn't a scheme implementation like PLT-scheme or Chicken be just as good, if not even better? Clojure is too much of a moving animal to be considered newbie friendly in my opinion.<p>So why is Clojure considered to be a modern lisp?
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crc
Clojure was the first lisp that I could seriously get into. I have a java
background and the familiarity of JVM was partly helpful when I was learning
it. I guess for people who are new to both java and lisp, it may be bit
harder.

The language changing fast wasn't a concern to me then, and I was putting lot
of time to keeping up with the changes by lurking in the mailing list and irc.
It was fascinating to watch language design happen in front of my eyes. I
think newbies would do fine with clojure (particularly at its current
relatively stable state). I guess it just takes a bit of an effort.

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stonemetal
Perhaps because it is a modern lisp. I am not sure why anyone would direct
newbs towards it since it is as you mention in flux. Though it seems like it
should settle down some since it had its 1.0 release.

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zaphar
1\. It's backed by the entire Java library ecosystem. 2\. It's syntax is a
little bit improved but still maintains the code as data that makes lisp lisp.
3\. defprotocol and deftype (they promise to be awesome)

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startupgrrl
Clojure has all the properties of a modern lisp. It compiles into java
bytecode and keeps data and code separate. This is not possible to do with the
.NET CLR bytecode representation because of the way it handles unsafe
pointers, but it should be corrected in the next edition of LLVM.

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paddy_m
could you explain more about how the .NET CLR treats unsafe pointers
differently. Any links?

