
Hostiness - llambda
http://blog.fogus.me/2012/10/09/hostiness/
======
frou_dh
Admittedly I'm nitpicking an explicit design decision of a fantastic
achievement (Clojure), but when studying it, it bothered me that Java/JVM
stuff actively surfaced rather than being entirely a concern of the
implementers. I had/have never programmed Java and have no interest in it, but
nonetheless had to start caring about what java.blah.Things and their API
were; what JAR files, Classpaths, Classloaders were all about; etc. For me,
this alien stuff nestled in and around Clojure-proper brought a scattered
feeling to what otherwise felt very tight and coherent.

~~~
fogus
Like many programming languages, Clojure was designed to solve the problems
that its implementer (Rich Hickey) was having. That is, Rich wanted a
powerful, fast and complete Lisp implementation centered around concurrent
processing to run on the JVM. That the JVM is front and center is a design
feature. It's not a feature that will appeal to everyone, but it's a feature
nonetheless.

------
saurabh
There is a Smalltalk implementation in Factor

[http://factor-language.blogspot.in/2009/04/sup-dawg-we-
heard...](http://factor-language.blogspot.in/2009/04/sup-dawg-we-heard-you-
like-smalltalk-so.html)

Also from that page,

"If you want to experiment with language design but don't want to spend five
years implementing a language like we did, you should consider using an
existing system to host your language on, and Factor is one of several great
choices in this regard." - Slava Pestov, Creator of Factor

------
j_baker
Also worth noting pypy: <http://pypy.org/>

