Quote:
Originally Posted by candybar
Clojure is NOT a beginner's language. If your a self-taught person who copy/pasted PHP from w3schools or hacked via plug-ins and frameworks, you'll most certainly be lost with any lisp. Many concepts are hard as hell to wrap your brain around as it is: let, lists, the reasoning and logic behind s-expressions, etc, much less putting all of that together.
The complaint against v1.0 stuff is mostly incorrect. v1.0 means nothing at all in the add-ons becuase version numbers are usually not maintained or recognized in the Clojure community. The second reason is that Clojure is an incredibly young language, so of course the libraries aren't going to be perfect or old. With that said, I agree that much work needs to be done in improving the libraries and plug-ins, but I think that the "market" will eventually figure this out.
Many libraries must be completed for Clojure, but the first steps have been taken.
Clojure has an excellent record of maintaining backwards compatibility from v1.4 to 1.3 etc, especially compared to PHP5 and Python3.
I generally blame myself when stuff goes wrong, and as far as my experience goes, when something went wrong in the install, or something was going wrong, I always found it was something that was my fault due to ignorance or other general stupidity, like mispelling, forgetting to name a file correctly, etc.
The too many choices argument is empty in my opinion. Do people call Ruby bad because it has too many gems? Is PHP terrible because there are 25+ frameworks and 10+ CMS platforms?
I agree that the documentation at clojure.org sucks and could use some examples. There is a lack of tutorials and learning resources as well. This is something that I am sure will be fixed as time goes on. Most everything you need can be learned from a $20 t $30 book. I'm not sure why this is too expensive for people to pay. However, with that said, the resources out there are really good. It's not the general mess you'd find if you tried to learn other more popular languages with a questionable coder base. In other words, the chances you learning how to program it well is greatly increased. Can't say the same about PHP, javaScript, and a few other languages.
There are other options besides emacs. There are excellent plug-ins for Eclipse, jEdit, etc.
Slow startup is a legitimate complaint. This prevents Clojure from being a scripting language. I'll let you decide how you feel about this.
The error messages are, yes, something to get used to. Seeing 500 lines of errors is quite shocking at first, until you know where to look. Yes, a good debugger is sorely needed.
I would never defend the language to the death, that's just silly. There are a few good things going for it though: it's widely considered to be a beginner-friendly community. In the last survey, only 2% said it was unfriendly.
Yes, no way (easy) to program and Android either. This is a ******ed argument because Android uses Java but does not use the JVM. However, this is being worked on.
Clojure also compiles to things beside the JVM, including CLR and Scheme-to-C-to-the-metal.
Quote:
You also didn't address the documentation issue. Microsoft shows sample code for F# in its .NET API documentation. F# works out of the box in Visual Studio. Microsoft even added serious functional features inspired by F# to C# and .NET API, making interoperability substantially easier than say, between Java and Clojure.
I'm not familiar with F#:
Code:
let asynctask = async
{
let req = WebRequest.Create(url)
let! response = req.GetResponseAsync()
use stream = response.GetResponseStream()
use streamreader = new System.IO.StreamReader(stream)
return streamreader.ReadToEnd()
}
Code:
let rec factorial n =
match n with
| 0 -> 1
| _ -> n * factorial (n - 1)
Code:
let rec printList lst =
match lst with
| [] -> ()
| h :: t ->
printf "%d\n" h
printList t
Not sure if want to use it, to be honest.
The interop between Java and Clojure is an empty argument. The interop is between the JVM world and Clojure, which means you can use anything from the JVM ecosystem in Clojure, which isn't limited to Java.
And from what I've seen, it's as simple as
(:use 'java.blah.blah)
Not sure why that's hard.
Quote:
Clojure works fine in Windows as well, btw.
Yes, it does. After you set up all pathways....
Quote:
Do you use Clojure in production?
I'm currently building a website, for myself, in Clojure, and I don't think it is too difficult to use. Maybe you'll be able to see it and you can make your own determination on whether it works well or not.
I'm not a professional programmer. I started self-learning CS a little over a year ago. It just so happened that my learning path traveled through Scheme. I'm doing the website to measure how much I learned over the past year. Seems like I learned more than I realized.
Last edited by daveT; 09-06-2012 at 06:51 PM.
