On Nov 10, 9:55 am, "Robert Lally" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > - 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.
If a programming language improves even one person's productivity, then isn't it useful? C was very useful to the original Unix hackers because it gave them the machine abstraction they wanted. Lisp was useful for the original AI hackers because it let them compute with symbols and gave them the flexibility to handle complex problems. Lua is useful to people who want an embedded scripting language in their C programs, because it's very lightweight. Matlab is useful for people who want a natural syntax for solving linear algebra problems and an IDE tailored for that task. All of these languages can coexist and a good programmer will pick up the one best suited for the problems she has to solve. An "average" programmer will use whatever language most like the one he learned in school, or whatever language his boss tells him to use, or whatever language has a canned solution for his problem. That's OK and good programmers shouldn't look down on average programmers, but good programmers also aren't obligated to write programming languages for them. (Maybe average programmers should be the ones designing programming languages for themselves, just like the best math teachers are often those who struggled with math in school, so they know how to communicate with people who are struggling.) > - 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. To me Java was a loss in productivity since any programming task requires several lines of boilerplate code, even more than in C. mfh --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
