I'll try :) It was really a polemical post for a polemical thread, but my main points can be extracted here. Feel free to read as many or as few of them as you are inclined:
* Clojure still ends up turning off new users more than it needs to. This may be partly an issue of priorities (see the Getting Started section on clojure.org). Many good efforts are going into libraries, but this doesn't necessarily lead to a smoothe starting path. That would require choices from the top. * It also can do a better job of attracting and retaining core contributors. I cited an example of someone who posted a patch to make refs persistent. She ended up being ignored, and left for Erlang. But Clojure needs people like her. * Putting up barriers to entry is \not a good thing. The benefits of getting new users outweigh the drawbacks, because they will bring more functionality and maturity with them. It only takes a small effort to filter out 'noise' in the group (even mine!). * Since Lisp is highly extensible, in the long run being 'prescriptive' is a losing battle. It is better to eventually add standard 'bad' features to the language than to tempt third parties to do it in even worse and incompatible ways. * Clojure is already enough of a new way of thinking, and it may be simply too much at once for many people. If a gentle path gets more people into the ecosystem, it's worth it----once they are in Clojure they can be steered towards better, more functional ways of doing things. In any case, experienced users are always free to ignore extra features. * It's meant to be a pragmatic language. This means that a prime goal should be to get people writing useful (web, GUI, shell) code in it right away. Having choices is good, but being forced to make all these choices your first day of writing Clojure, when you don't have a "sixth sense" about the community and What Really Works, is needlessly discouraging. * The attitude that Smart People are precisely the ones who will want to deal with Clojure's existing drawbacks ends up excluding many great future Clojurians. (A lot of smart people are busy.) The attitude itself is off-putting and self-defeating. Moreover, dealing with these issues takes \everyone's time. * Final (added) point: while it might have made sense to be 'prescriptive' initially in order to establish the identity, core, and soul of the language, this has been done sufficiently. Newcomers are not going to be confused about what the main points of Clojure are now. There is therefore less risk in making it broadly useful to different paradigms. If you want to read the arguments behind all that, you can wade into the post----or add your own. On Jul 6, 9:37 pm, Sean Corfield <seancorfi...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 7:21 PM, Ken Wesson <kwess...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Does the term "tl;dr" mean anything to you? > > I'll remember this date - I find myself really liking / agreeing with > one of Ken's posts :) > > Sorry nchubrich but that really was far too long - I started reading > but couldn't find any meat in the first few paragraphs and just tuned > out... I may try again later but if you can _summarize_ more ppl will > read what you're trying to say. > -- > Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN > An Architect's View --http://corfield.org/ > World Singles, LLC. --http://worldsingles.com/ > Railo Technologies, Inc. --http://www.getrailo.com/ > > "Perfection is the enemy of the good." > -- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880) -- 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
