
Clojure adds AOT compilation - cstejerean
http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/58e3f8e5dfb876c9?pli=1
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chollida1
This is great news.

I've finished reading the fist draft of the Pragmatic Programmers new book on
Clojure and I can't wait until they release another draft. The first draft
only contains about half the chapters.

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raju
Glad to hear that you liked the book. I am looking forward to getting the beta
book myself, but have three books on my table right now. Hopefully soon.

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markessien
If one were to read only this site, one would have the feeling that Clojure
were taking over the programming language world. Clojure is the skinny jeans
of the programming world - it may be cool right now, but in 5 years you'll be
feeling slightly ashamed that you jumped on the fashion train.

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icey
Do you care to say why you think that?

There haven't been too many people who have really had bad things to say about
Clojure once they've accepted the fact that it targets the JVM.

I know I used to be one of those guys who reflexively went "Java? GROSS!", but
then I actually took a look at the language and think that it's one of the
better thought out languages to emerge in the past few years.

[Edit: Sorry, my tone seemed a little confrontational here - I'm genuinely
curious as to what you perceive the problems with Clojure to be? So far I
haven't heard many negatives about it and I'm curious to hear what people
think those negatives are. So far, the only real "negative" I've heard is that
Clojure is not multi-paradigm in the way CL is.]

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markessien
It does not have to have a problem to be a fad. Programming languages all
require a big time investment in learning them - so those that exist tend to
stay around. People only change languages when there are very clear benefits.
Clojure seems to have pulled up to the same level as other much older and
better known programming languages - there are no benefits (at the moment) to
it that would make the mass of programmers switch to it.

Ruby is a good language, but it only became popular when it offered a clear
benefit.

For a language to enter the mainstream and stay in the mainstream, it has to
do a lot more than just not be bad. It has to be better than others in some
way.

(By the way, being a functional language does not make it better, it makes it
worse, since most programmers have trouble grasping functional concepts)

At the moment, clojure may not have any negatives, but it does not have any
strong positives, so I don't see why it would catch on.

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whacked_new
Suppose your arguments are true. Here's why clojure is destined to be big.

Clear benefit: you have Java at your disposal, while being "new and cool."
From a library standpoint it is Java + extras.

Functional does not make it better: if there are two types of people, one that
prefers functional, one imperative, go ahead! Let the functional use clj, the
imperative use java. Now you can compile to .class and use either paradigm!

I don't code lisp regularly, but I'm convinced clojure is the NBT and so I'm
preparing to jump ship after it matures :D

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markessien
Should we take a bet on that? I say that with no extra framework coming up
that utilizes clojure, clojure will forever remain a small niche product.

~~~
chollida1
> Should we take a bet on that? I say that with no extra framework coming up
> that utilizes clojure, clojure will forever remain a small niche product.

I'm not sure how Clojure will play out but remember it's only a few years old.
You could have said the same thing about Ruby in 1997.

~~~
arohner
Clojure's first birthday was just a few weeks ago.

