

What's your reason to learn Clojure? - ecounysis
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/5269/whats-your-reason-to-learn-clojure

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bartonfink
I became interested in Lisp a couple of years ago after going through far too
much pain with a relatively simple genetic programming exercise I wrote in
C++. Since I didn't have direct access to the AST, I was mutating a string
that I passed into a simple interpreter I had to write. When everything was
done, I thought about how bad a choice it was to use C++ for this sort of
problem because performance just wasn't as important as I thought.

I became interested in Clojure soon after that because I listened to a Rich
Hickey talk where he described how languages are built on platforms in a way
they weren't 20 years ago (you'd run directly on the OS and only have access
to the libraries you wrote or linked in). Since I knew Java, the JVM and the
libraries that come with it, I thought Clojure made the most logical choice if
I was going to learn a Lisp.

I've been toying with it off and on since, and although I can't compare it to
other Lisps, I can say that I think it's definitely a superior programming
language to any other language I've worked with. Syntax annoys the hell out of
me now.

