Our company was recently formed in stages. The first stage did a lot of research and decided we needed strong NLP tools and felt that the right direction to go with the NLP was Python. I had spent 7 years doing NLP and advised them on that aspect and had spent a lot of time doing NLP in Python. I also despise Java. OK maybe too harsh but I still dislike it. So the new crew was hired for the web development and product development and while they all had Python experience at least one of them I can fairly call an expert in Clojure. He suggested it.
There are some great NLP libraries in Java. NLP is at it's heart about map/reduce and very compartmentalized linear algebra. In looking at Clojure I decided while it might be hard for me to program in, I could do work in Java as I learned Clojure and we could make progress. As it turns out I was right - learning clojure is a pain in the butt if all you've ever done are Algol based languages (PL/1, Pascal, C, C++, Java, C#, Python for me). What closed the loop for me was Clojure Koans. They are the best thing I've ever encountered in learning a language. Once you get what they are doing to get you to learn, enlightenment follows quickly. Our whole team voted in the positive for Clojure and Clojurescript. We've had no problem working with the Stanford CoreNLP library, D3, datomic, storm and all the other great stuff out there. It has been a really great 6 1/2 months and I am looking forward to our first delivery this month and a future delivery for our really big project. The company name is Cicayda and we are located in Nashville, TN where there is a growing band of functional programmers of all types. -- 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
