How innovative is Clojure as a Lisp dialect from Lisp expert's perspective?

Re:How innovative is Clojure as a Lisp dialect from Lisp exp... by int_19h on Sunday January 06, 2019 @09:54PM (#18842392)

> which is that they are so simple that the level of effort to port Clojure to other platforms (ClojureScript, Clojure CLR, etc)

I don't see why that would be at all relevant to porting to other platforms? Most languages with richer syntax would parse to a backend-independent AST first, and so porting to a new platform would not require touching the parsing code at all - you'd be working on the same level as S-exprs, effectively.

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Re:How innovative is Clojure as a Lisp dialect from Lisp exp... by dustingetz on Sunday January 06, 2019 @10:13PM (#18842481)

the s-expressions make the compiler simple. Clojure the language was designed to make portability simple. you need both

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Re:How innovative is Clojure as a Lisp dialect from Lisp exp... by int_19h on Monday January 07, 2019 @04:01PM (#18850019)

A well-designed grammar isn't difficult to parse into S-expressions. And they were writing compilers for languages with rich grammars (e.g. Algol-60) back in 1960s - often in hand-written assembly, on punch cards! I think a claim that it makes the implementation overly complex strains credulity.

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