

Languages and Axioms (thoughts Clojure and Lisp) - gnosis
http://www.jakevoytko.com/blog/2009/03/10/languages-and-axioms/

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Xurinos
I respect the author's directions -- and Clojure is a fine language -- but I
was a little put off by this assertion:

 _I’m only really getting at the fact that even the ultra-flexible of Common
Lisp wasn’t written to handle all computing scenarios._

This came after he noted that Lisp includes destructive functions and
implementation-specific multithread schemes. Sure, on the one hand, the CL
standard is a little long in the tooth, but on the other hand...

(1) "Pure functional" is less flexible than "functional plus features for
imperative programming". It was weird that he cited destructive, efficient
functions as a negative, that they contributed to Lisp not supporting "all
computing scenarios". We can happily debate functional approaches as being
less bug-ridden and all that jazz, and those advantages come with the tradeoff
of being less flexible.

(2) A Turing-complete language supports all computing scenarios.

(3) Okay, sure, you want access to some OS services, not just academic
completeness, and that does end up being implementation-specific. Fortunately,
CL gives us an out: you can implement layers that detect the implementations
and do whatever specific thing was provided. Every modern CL implementation
supports multithreading in one form or another. There are several packages
contributed by Lispers that show different approaches to multithreaded and
multiprocessing apps. There is no one true way with that. Clojure provides
several approaches, and there are several libraries for Lisp that provide
several approaches.

Over Clojure, CL continues to provide some advantages, at least to me... Less
syntax; compiles to machine code; mature; no special functions required for
recursion, recursive iteration, or trampolining; and not limited by the JVM. A
couple of those end up being Clojure's advantages, too, depending on your
perspective (syntax, JVM).

Both fine languages. Just a weird comment in the middle of a good essay.

