I agree with Sean, the STM is a big feature also are parallelism and data immutability. These features are working now and they make things a lot simpler.
I agree also that the lack of documentation is a barrier but even with documentation the learning curve would not be much shorter again because the language departs from concepts carried on in most programming languages, not because of it's syntax. Stuart has written a smart book and that as a starting point is more than enough. Hands-on is required to learn a new language and not just for academic purposes. Having a real problem to solve is better. You say that Clojure is a better Java... totally wrong. Java sits where it needs to be, at the bottom of the stack like assemblers in the 70s/80s. Getting interop with Java is as obvious as being able to call an assembly routine from a higher level language or an external library. No one would question this ability in other languages. No one wants to rewrite mundane tasks if they are already programmed. If this makes you think that Clojure is a better Java well that relates to my comments later in this post. Your statement that Clojure should stand apart from others is deeply wrong. It is already a breed of its own. Borrowing best ideas from other languages does not mean that the end result is a Babel tower. If you think that Clojure is not well articulated and does not have it's own personality that also relates to my comments following this paragraph. You warn that you learn languages "just for the fun of it". I would be curious to know how much time you spent learning Clojure... I personally worked with Fortran, Cobol, PL/1, Lisp, C/C++, VB, Java, JS and so many other languages to deliver working systems in production not counting half a dozen assemblers (with systems above 20,000 code lines). Many of these were multi threaded apps before libthread even existed. Dynamic languages were far more common 20 years ago than now btwy. We have been working with Clojure for more than a 16 months with a message bus software in production for 11 months. Not a simple HelloWorld app.... Just to get up to write decent production code with Clojure it took me a good 4 months. I'm a 25 years exp. guy and I have been writing code and designing systems for that life span. I am not an "educated" manager with grey hairs. My colleagues are younger and did not do better. The changes that Clojure brings in the "old" ways we used to program are significantly important to make learning a steep curve before you can write code that you can read again without shame. So either you are a genius and went through Clojure faster than we could, learning all the features it offers, or you just skimmed the surface. I think the later applies and that you have some "toupet" to compare a language with others without any extensive field use of most of them. Get a few millions lines of code behind you, then you may eventually write decent critics. Meanwhile be humble... Luc On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 13:04 -0800, kusi wrote: > http://kusimari.blogspot.com/2009/12/analysing-clojure-programming-language.html > -- 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
