> I am a physicist. I have been using Clojure full time for the last > year and a half. The reasons that Rich (and most other Clojure > evangelists) give for using Clojure, are all nice and good, but they > point to what computer scientists think about. If you want scientists > and engineers to think about switching to Clojure, you need to talk to > the concerns that they have. Of course, there is some overlap.
If you're comparing with Fortran, my favorite advantage is that I can create a new array in a function, and return it from that function. In Fortran, I would have needed to create the array in whatever code calls that function, and pass the array in. This issue adds a lot of overhead to any effort to reuse code. (I'm not sure if this issue was fixed in the more recent Fortran 2003 or 2008 versions.) I know a lot of nuclear engineers, from my previous life as a nuclear engineering grad student, and I have been unable to convince any of them to try languages other than Fortran. Their arguments fall into three categories. 1) Not fast enough. If it's even a little slower than Fortran, that's unacceptable. Even C++ is not acceptable for this reason, and anything with garbage collection is worthy of a raised nose. This actually seems like a legitimate reason. I just think that faster development time is worth giving up some execution speed, especially if you can use the extra time to experiment with possibly faster algorithms. Additionally, raw execution speed is one of the priorities for the upcoming Clojure 1.3. 2) It's not Fortran, and I don't have time to learn another language. I have work to do. Of course, much of that work involves programming in Fortran, and would get done so much faster in any other language. 3) It doesn't work on [big computer configured by someone else]. Of course, the computer was configured that way to support a bunch of engineers who only program in Fortran. If this were the real problem, the computer would be configured differently. ================================================= I think the best thing you can do to convince your colleagues to use Clojure, is to create open source Clojure libraries and applications that they would find useful. Eventually they will want more than what the applications provide out of the box. The desire to customize their favorite tool will provide an immediate motivation to learn Clojure, and the fact that such a great tool was created in Clojure will be good evidence that Clojure could be useful in other projects. Bonus points if that tool, created in Clojure, turns out to be faster than they would have expected from a Fortran program. -- 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
