Re:Dialects of Lisp
by mark_l_watson on Friday February 22, 2013 @02:37PM
(#5266235)
Well, Rich used to use Common Lisp (I know because I used to use his very neat LispWorks to Java bridge stuff).
Clojure really does hit the sweet spot combining a concise agile language with good practical decisions, similar I think to some of the decisions that went into the design of Scala (like a generalized seq API for lots of data structures).
Except for some personal serious side projects, I am now retired, and I chose Clojure over other good possibilities (e.g., Common Lisp, Racket, Gambit-C, Scala, Smalltalk, or Ruby) because it is a practical language and still lots fun to code in.
Now that I don't have to worry about staying up to speed on all of the languages my customers used to like using, I find that just using a single language really saves me a lot of time. Some advice for people still working: perhaps choosing a single practical and extensible language like Scala or Clojure is a good strategy; I used to like being a polyglot programmer but that requires a lot of overhead!
Clojure really does hit the sweet spot combining a concise agile language with good practical decisions, similar I think to some of the decisions that went into the design of Scala (like a generalized seq API for lots of data structures).
Except for some personal serious side projects, I am now retired, and I chose Clojure over other good possibilities (e.g., Common Lisp, Racket, Gambit-C, Scala, Smalltalk, or Ruby) because it is a practical language and still lots fun to code in.
Now that I don't have to worry about staying up to speed on all of the languages my customers used to like using, I find that just using a single language really saves me a lot of time. Some advice for people still working: perhaps choosing a single practical and extensible language like Scala or Clojure is a good strategy; I used to like being a polyglot programmer but that requires a lot of overhead!