Rich Hickey on Clojure

Rich Hickey on Clojure

For this week's blog, we heard Rich Hickey's opinion on Clojure. He starts talking about Lisp and its importance in understanding programs as a data structure. Also, he talks about is huge potential as the ability to also compile programs as data structures is really useful. However, Hickey also gives some huge arguments of why he thinks Lisp is not so popular and is its own power. It may sound odd at first, but it does make sense. Since Lisp is a really powerful language, everybody has its own dialect or way to develop in that same language. Also, not everybody knows all its capabilities or uses them at its 100% so some functions/abilities become unused, unsupported and unfollowed.

Hickey also talks on how the creation of Clojure was a need to fix one of Lisp's biggest problems which was the communication with other languages. Thanks to this need and give Lisp this ability is why Clojure was created. Let's also remark that the alleged power of Lisp doesn't mean that is a language that can withstood a whole system and thus an integration with other languages is required. Clojure keeps all the functionality and power of Lisp without being restricted to only its library. This is why also Clojure brings the ability to compile and use a whole repository of Java libraries.

In conclusion, I think the article is redundant and states what many other articles about Lisp does and praises it as so. I did learn a couple of different things, but I do think is the same Lisp-fanboy praises.