I appreciate the answers that everyone has given to my post, and I thought I'd send a single response before ceasing my bleating; I do realise that this discussion has the potential to devolve into multiple different religious wars, and I appreciate everyone's tolerance and forbearance so far. I think, that most people who have responded have done so from the perspective that they feel Clojure currently strikes a good balance between terseness and comprehensibility. Since there is currently no strong IDE offering, everyone who is writing Clojure is currently writing in a general purpose text editor, perhaps with some customisation to make the process more pleasant. Many of the people on the list have pre-existing preference for a text editor and the fact that they can work effectively in Clojure is a real win.
A few thoughts before I vanish back into the crowd: - The approach that Clojure takes to state management in a multi-threaded environment is very promising. I don't know if it is 'the right answer' to the problems of concurrency and parallelism .. but if it is I'd like to see it succeed. Success in this case would have to be considered in terms of wide-scale adoption. I believe that Lisp and, later, Smalltalk were "the right answer" of their time, but both failed to capture the mind-share they deserved. - The current users of Clojure probably aren't representative of the development community as a whole. I'm not suggesting that they/we are better or worse than average. Just that early adopters are atypical, exemplified by the fact that they are early adopters. I'm sure that many of the developers currently contributing to this list could work effectively using any tools, and with any naming convention you cared to concoct. If Clojure is adopted widely, the programmers working with it will predominantly be using an IDE, running on Windows. They won't be using Vi or Emacs or TextMate ( fine editors all, and I love them all equally ). I believe that optimising for this group is key to success. - The languages that have grabbed major developer mind-share have each been more expressive than the last, but also more verbose in the choice of identifiers. C gave us printf, Java gave us System.out.println. In an IDE world verbosity actually helps you be more productive since you can disambiguate and investigate using code completion - if aget, aset and co were named array-set, array-get then I could type array-<insert code completion key> to see a list of all the array related functions. With the names as they stand typing a<insert code completion key> will give me quite a long list of mostly irrelevant functions. Of course this is all predicated upon the creation of IDE tooling that is still very far away, so it is in many ways an argument based on a future which may never happen. I can see the value in optimising for now rather than the future, but I fear being trapped in a local optima. Rob Lally. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
