On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 12:36 AM, Tim Daly <d...@axiom-developer.org> wrote: > I am trying to understand why lisp is more productive (for me) than java.
Let me go off at a bit of a tangent and then I'll answer some of your questions. First off, I currently do mostly web application development and I do it in CFML. I use Railo as my primary CFML engine. It's a free open source (LGPL) JBoss community project that dynamically compiles CFML to JVM bytecode and it's very fast. For those not familiar with CFML - or who only know it from olden days - it's a tag-based templating language for web pages and (now) a fully script-based (C-like) dynamic language for objects on the back end. I am very productive in CFML, much more so than Java. I believe it's for the same reasons you state (the OODA-loop, primarily). CFML can be written in a more Java style with full typing (although it's all runtime checked) or no typing (closer to Clojure style). It's easy to change Television to Monitor if you've used the Clojure style of programming (which I do - types are for the birds :) So, productivity comes from a number of things that speak to the abstraction level of the language (and the code). My experience - with lots and lots of languages now, after OMG 30 years of doing this :( - is that untyped languages (or loosely typed languages) are more abstract and more productive. In addition, languages that behave like interpreted / scripted languages (i.e., where the explicit edit-compile-test cycle is hidden) are more productive. Hopefully that supports your "Lisp more productive than Java" hypothesis. I also find Scala more productive than Java because, although it has the edit-compile-test cycle and strong typing, it has inferred types and a lot more language-level abstractions than Java (and much less ceremony). I also find Groovy more productive than Java because it's a dynamically typed language and has less of the ceremony of Java. The only thing preventing me being more productive in Clojure is a lack of familiarity that I'm sure will come over the next year as I use it more... -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://getrailo.com/ An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ "If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood -- 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
