> Getting things done is cool. One other point. Getting things done in Clojure and getting paid for it is cool. One of the things I like about clojure is that its easy interface to java dramatically increases its chances of industry acceptance. New technologies, to be accepted, must solve a FELT crisis- level problem while not creating significant new problems.
Context: the JVM is great, has vast acceptance and many tools, libraries, and developers. Many existing apps are written in it and need to be maintained. Industry will be using it for a long time, especially if they have a solution to the threading problem. Crisis: Java is the pits. Programmers have never really liked it. With the recent rise of dynamic languages they are increasingly clear why they don't like it. Paul Graham's writings have lit the fires for Lisp- class languages, increasing the felt frustration. Mutli-core chips are now the norm and few languages can exploit them. Demand for development resources in industry still exceeds supply. Lots of felt frustration and experimentation in the air. Solution (first try): Jython and JRuby don't solve the thread interaction and side-effect problems well. They are also rather slow and don't have macros. But their standard versions are well known, especially in the case of Python. Erlang and Haskell don't run on the JVM. Lisp-class languages that do run on the JVM (Kawa, etc.) are nice, but are more tainted by the market perception problems of Lisp and Scheme. Solution: It must be JVM-based and it must be a Lisp-class language to get the full power of macros and s-expressions. Clean up the worst of the innumerable parens. Add the map and array structures with literal support which have proven so useful in Python (which cleans up still more parens). Make it reasonably fast. Make java interaction trivial. Reduce bugs dramatically and enable powerful threading by controlling side-effects. I really do think you've got a tiger by the tail here, Rich. Now all we have to do is spread the good news to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I'd love to see some more discussion on this forum on how we can conquer the programming world with this. One possible point of attack is to try to interest Paul Graham in writing about Clojure. That by itself would drive a lot of interest here. He's pushing Arc, of course, but he might still be willing to discuss it. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
