Martin, I was short with you yesterday. I'm sorry about that. Please let me try again.
I'm all for providing better documentation, eliminating bad design, and holding hands as people get up to speed. As a community, we constantly need to do more work to make it accessible. That's the point of the IRC channel & this list. I believe you browse the archives you'll see that mutual assistance is the prevailing attitude here. Clojure's clean design does make it easy to learn. The sequence abstraction makes the core library small. The persistent data structures make it easier to write multithreaded stuff than in any other language (I invite you to provide a counter example). The macro system is hygienic, and as powerful as any other. I'm going to use a point from Paul Grahams' crtique of Java: http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html The main point I want to echo is that tools "designed for other people" always seem to be inferior to tools "designed for myself". Clojure was originally written by Rich for Rich. I check that any feature I suggest really improves my own code before I post to the list. After that, the idea has to survive critique from lots of other Clojure experts, making sure that the feature is "designed for myself". A lot of proposals don't get past this step, because it is already solved or it doesn't fit into the Clojure way. Removing parens is one of those changes that simultaneously is "designed for other people" and makes the expert's job more difficult (By making macro writing & argument resolution harder). It's a complete and total loss from my perspective, and that is what evokes the emotional response. I've suffered enough at the hands of languages "designed for other poeple". This is Clojure, and I want to keep it a language "designed for myself". Sean On Dec 19, 9:18 am, Martin Coxall <pseudo.m...@me.com> wrote: > > It is proudly a Lisp for people that want to get things done. Any > > Java/.NET/Python/Brainfuck/Ruby/Basic/C/C++ (No Perlmongers :)) that > > want to get better are welcome. However, there is a way things are > > done in the language, driven by the underlying problems reality > > imposes on developers. A prospective Clojure developer must accept > > that the language does this to help you, not hurt you, and they need > > to be open to the ideas. > > > That is the intended audience. > > Clojure may be a new Lisp, but it seems the die hard holier-than-thou > attitude of old-school Lipsers is alive and well. > > Look, there's a reason nobody uses Lisp. And the attitude of "we know best > and if you can't see that you're an idiot" is certainly part of it. > > A prospective Clojure developer "must" not do anything. They will probably > take one look at Clojure's seemingly user-hostile syntax, read how unless > they immediately embrace parens that they are *not welcome*, click their > browser back button and never give another thought to Clojure again. > > Martin -- 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
