FWIW, the first thing I did when I encountered Clojure was built a Tiny CLOS like system with inheritance. I've since come to the conclusion it was a waste of time and Clojure offers an equally good set of tools.
After examining a few powerful paradigms, OO, FP, LP, etc I'm not sure what "natural" could possibly mean besides "familiar" which is a limited metric in my opinion. David On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 6:17 PM, Warren Lynn <wrn.l...@gmail.com> wrote: > Thanks for the suggestion. I understand part of the joy (and pain) of > learning a new language is to change the way of thinking. So I > probably need to take on something no-trivial but also not > overwhelming to understand the issue or benefit better. > > But eventually, a language cannot meet everybody's needs/tastes. In my > view, there are certain patterns that are just "natural" to most > people (not simply because they were taught like that in school), and > a language will be more productive for those people to have those > patterns (maybe with extra enhancements and enlightenment). I am sure > with maps and multimethods you have actually a superset of any OO > systems, and certain people find it much productive, but lacking > direct support of certain natural patterns will lose many capable but > non-genius programmers (which is nothing wrong if that is not part of > the language's objectives). Part of my learning here is to find out if > the language is right for me. > > > On May 20, 5:37 pm, Bill Caputo <logos...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On May 20, 2012, at 4:23 PM, Warren Lynn wrote: > > > > >> defrecord, deftype, and defprotocol provide extensible low level > > >> abstractions like the kind Clojure is built on. > > > > >> As a Clojure programmer you should only need them rarely. > > > > >> As a beginner you should never use them. > > > Well, I don't want to be a beginner for too long, :-) > > > > I am not a clojure beginner (though far from feeling I know all there is > to learn about it). I have been using clojure for almost a year; my team > has rebuilt the central part of our system (which is relied on by just > about every other team where I work) out of clojure and have had it in > production for 6 months. > > > > I've yet to even learn *how* to use defrecord, deftype & defprotocol. > > > > IMO, If you're not doing a lot of java interop (i.e. where your clojure > code is being consumed by java clients) you might never need them. > > > > As someone who came from, C++, C# & Ruby (and a little Java) - i.e. OO - > to clojure & FP, I *strongly* recommend that you take a project (preferably > one that you aren't hanging your livelihood on, but trust me it's a real > rush) and try *really* hard to solve your design problems just with maps, > vectors and the other core data structures (I first tried this in ruby, btw > - a great learning experience and gave me a strong appreciation for the > optimizations that clojure provides to make such code practical). > > > > IOW: pretend for a project that OO doesn't exist. When you're done, > you'll have learned a lot, you'll still have what you know about OO, and > when you're done you'll have lost nothing except your time and your > perspective. You'll be doing yourself an enormous disservice if you simply > try to map clojure onto your current way of working/thinking. > > > > bill > > -- > 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 > -- 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
