> Having more powerful ways to express yourself doesn't make it harder to read code
Well, depends. For example, reading my older Haskell code is definitely harder than my Java code. Also, only a handful of teams is lucky enough to have only good programmers. There is always someone who sees some great advanced concept and applies it without the necessary know-how on the dangers/context of that feature. I think Haskell, Clojure and Scala as well are somewhat prone to this.
Re:Lisp as an alternative to Java (2000)
by Viliam1234 on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @07:01PM
(#26732675)
Given the choice between undocumented Java code and undocumented Clojure code... I'd rather take my chances with Java.
Re:Lisp as an alternative to Java (2000)
by tombert on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @09:29AM
(#26724606)
I've had similar issues with immature libraries, to a point where nowadays I will usually end up using the Java libraries and write my own wrapper around it if it's not Clojurey enough for my liking. Much as I dislike Java as a language, I don't think anyone would dispute that it has pretty excellent library support, so I figure that there's no reason I shouln't exploit that fact in Clojure.
The issues I've had with Clojure are the small community leading to questionable documentation and supporting libraries just feel a little underdone once off the beaten track. There is also the radically different style of programming (which is also the biggest plus). But the power of the abstractions isn't a problem, it just means there is less to read. If anything, reading the source code of libraries becomes more feasible because often libraries are about instantiating an idea than writing lots of code.