Side by side assumes that you would write the Clojure solution this way.
But that's not how I (nor, I imagine, any experienced Lisper) would do it. Lisp programmers are not afraid to write compilers in Lisp targeting Lisp. This is not something a Python programmer would consider doing.
I would implement Dan Friedman et al's Scheme constraint solver (cKanren) in Clojure (which can be done in a few hours) so I could solve all sorts of problems, not just Sudoku, in 80 lines of code instead of 200 with very good performance.
Great, I was wondering what would be an idiomatic way of solving this in Clojure.
Given the addition of core.logic into Clojure 1.3.0, one could even skip the implementation of cKanren. Although to be honest I'm not altogether sure how core.logic measures up to cKanren.
I'm the main developer of core.logic :) core.logic is simply missing cKanren constraint solving extensions at the moment, but again they won't be hard to add since core.logic is a fairly faithful interpretation of miniKanren (the system which cKanren extends).
But that's not how I (nor, I imagine, any experienced Lisper) would do it. Lisp programmers are not afraid to write compilers in Lisp targeting Lisp. This is not something a Python programmer would consider doing.
I would implement Dan Friedman et al's Scheme constraint solver (cKanren) in Clojure (which can be done in a few hours) so I could solve all sorts of problems, not just Sudoku, in 80 lines of code instead of 200 with very good performance.