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Re:Your Language Features Are My Libraries by lg on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @10:25PM (#619748)
>The good news is, you don't have to be part of the problem. There is hardly any reason to use the "popular" languages. They don't have better platform support, they don't have better libraries, and they don't have better tools. So don't worry about them, they are for other people :)

This is why I'm not interested in Clojure, regardless of how nice a lisp it may be. Java libraries are poorly-designed, the prospect of wrestling with them again brings back memories of frustration. And you can bet that no one will ever write better ones, because the community will discourage people from "duplicating functionality."

Re:Your Language Features Are My Libraries by jimbokun on Thursday May 21, 2009 @09:14AM (#620370)
"Java libraries are poorly-designed, the prospect of wrestling with them again brings back memories of frustration."

One of the best things about Clojure is how it makes Java libraries suck much less. For example, line-seq turns a Java BufferedReader into a lazy sequence of String's, one for each line in the file.

http://clojure.org/api#toc334

You still have the suckiness of the multiple lines it takes to instantiate and clean up the BufferedReader, but macros like with-open makes that suck a little bit less, too.

http://clojure.org/api#toc612

Stir in some macro-fu of your own, and now you have the benefits of Java libraries minus the boilerplate suckiness. Basically, it turns Java into a "your language features are my libraries" language, no mean feat.

Re:Your Language Features Are My Libraries by weavejester on Thursday May 21, 2009 @08:09AM (#620275)
So your criticism of Clojure is based upon unfounded assumptions about what the community will do in future? Maybe you should look at what libraries are being created before you leap to conclusions?

There are many Clojure libraries that attempt to reimplement existing Java libraries. For instance, Ring is a HTTP specification for Clojure that reimplements much of the functionality of Java servlets.

Re:Your Language Features Are My Libraries by jrockway on Thursday May 21, 2009 @06:14AM (#620164)
My thoughts exactly.

It is easier to just steal Clojure's good features for CL. (funcallable everything is kind of nice.)