Item — HN Reader

Using an 'unfashionable' language is similar to other areas in life where one rejects mainstream or too modern things for obvious reasons: - Be different. - Use something which is extraordinarily suited or especially made for your task at hand (in other words: do not compromise). - Maturity and stability is great.

Please add more. The analogies are manifold.

I really like modern re-implementations of well proven languages (Clojure <- Lisp, Factor <- Forth, ...)

1 comments

As someone fairly new to programming I don't understand what makes modern implementation of Lisp like Clojure better than its ancestor. I like Scheme because it's ridiculously flexible. You can implement as many libraries of your own as you want with Scheme which I doubt can easily be done in something like C++. To me Clojure is an overdesigned and rigid version of Lisp. Why is that considered good? Since I am new to all this I might be missing something so I'd love if someone could ELI5 it to me. Thanks.

Naturally, other Lisps have advantages over Clojure, but here's a few advantages of Clojure. You might also want to check out this interview: (http://codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/)

* Enormous reach: access to both Java and Javascript ecosystems. (If you count ClojureScript. I don't know how Clojure CLR for .NET).

* Immutability by default. When you want state, its primitives help with concurrency.

* A good set of basic data structures, including lazy sequences.