Martin, > I see Clojure is well on the way to building a community at least as > repellingly exclusionary as all the other Lisps nobody uses.
Thanks for the thinly veiled jab. I've worked on a bunch of libraries, answered a bunch of questions on the mailing list, and attended a few meetups. I put in quite a bit of time to make beginners feel welcome and to help this community grow. I object to people who are -- to exaggerate somewhat -- saying "hey, this motorcycle's great, and I think tons more people would ride if you put two more wheels on. Let me know when you're finished". Real communities grow around people scratching shared itches, and I'm not going to spend my time working on somebody else's non-problem for free. I have plenty of -- paid -- Lisp work to do. (Must be all those customers that don't exist.) I think most of the active Clojure community ranges from not caring to genuinely liking s-expression notation, and many of us have seen (many times!) folks arrive from other languages, suggest that the Lisp of the day should switch to using indentation to get rid of all those parens, and then either move on to Ruby/Python/whatever… or realize than the parens aren't a problem after all. The same goes for infix math; lots of beginners start writing an infix math library, and by the time they're done they've become familiar with prefix notation and no longer want their new library. Someone who cares enough to solve a problem should go and solve it. Saying "we" should go and solve a problem is using weasel words to coerce others. Back on the topic: McCarthy originally intended Lisp to have an Algol- ish syntax (m-expressions), but nobody ever finished the work because they found s-expressions to be sufficient: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression > The project of defining M-expressions precisely and compiling them > or at least translating them into S-expressions was neither > finalized nor explicitly abandoned. It just receded into the > indefinite future, and a new generation of programmers appeared who > preferred internal notation to any FORTRAN-like or ALGOL-like > notation that could be devised. > — John McCarthy[1], History of Lisp I think a lot of people would benefit from learning the lessons of history. I'm done on this topic. It's old enough to drink, I don't think anything significant will come of it, and I'm happy with Clojure's current trajectory. -R -- 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
