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We can keep debating all day long how Java and Javascript suck, but the massive ecosystems based on these two suckers sadly won't go away anytime soon.

There are of course languages that are more fun to work with, but at the end of the day we all have to eat. I would love to see Common Lisp's former glory to be restored, but sadly the language use in the industry seems to be shrinking every year.

Clojure is a modern, practical Lisp dialect that lets me use real REPL and structural editing and at the same time keep my sanity intact, plus I get paid. Please don't be so harsh about it.

I think having a Lisp as a hosted language was an awesome idea, I'd rather write (slightly crippled) Lisp that targets multiple platforms and get paid, rather than "hacking" in a (real) Lisp for free, or even worse - no Lisp at all.

2 comments

You don't need to apologize for what you get paid to do. Barely anyone gets to work with the software they would use in their free time. That managers let you use some language does justify learning it, but it doesn't make that language better on technical (or aesthetic) merits.

PHP is bad. If you're getting paid for it, it's still bad. So what? People also get paid to scrub toilets.

Personally, I would rather write Java than Clojure. But I wouldn't quit if I suddenly had to use Clojure.

I haven't written much Java professionally (I know the language, I've used it), but I have written tons of Javascript code. I have to say - Clojurescript just makes much more sense. Java and Javascript are good as low-level languages for their respective platforms. But if you want to build something practical, Clojure really is much better.

And by the way, demonstrated Clojure code is very unusual. Nobody in practice writes anything even close to that. Java interop is baked into the language, but in practice it doesn't look as scary as in the blogpost.

If your grandmothers had taught you the elder language of the Sun, you would see the words, rituals, and invocations of javac as mere shadows of the sigils of the true magic.

PHP is not bad. No language is, even visual basic for applications isn't.

TIL I scrub toilets.

Somehow the party with the worst taste always seems to win.