I'm not anywhere near as deep into spec as would be needed to fully understand this thread, but I will say that I agree with those who object to the guitar analogy. That argument would work just as well as a response to someone who complained about the difficulty of C++, or assembler, or APL. What's beautiful about Clojure is that it is, right now, already, a language for experts--*and* for novices (except for error reporting). I'm not in favor of an assumption that it's only a language for experts, and that therefore it's OK if error reporting is hard for novices.
My standard for error reporting: modern Common Lisp implementations (e.g. SBCL, ABCL, CCL, LispWorks). Reading any stack trace requires learning, but the CL stacktraces are nowhere near as daunting as Java and Clojure. I don't expect Clojure's error reporting to ever be that good; I suspect that the overhead of doing that kind of thing on the JVM is not worth the cost. But it can aspire to that kind of ease. (In other respects, CL is more difficult than Clojure, imo.) If you read the introduction to Bjarne Soutstrup's C++ book 3rd ed (I don't know whether it's still there in the 4th), you'll see that at one point he says that his goal was to keep C++ a simple language. If you go on and read the rest of the book, you'll see how far from that goal the language ended up. I have (rare) moments when I worry that Clojure is great because it's young and hasn't had time to become a mess. I still trust Rich's judgement, though. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
