Why use Clojure?

Re:Why use Clojure? by TylerE on Tuesday December 24, 2013 @01:50PM (#6960587)

This is why I like nimrod, which gives you the best both worlds

    proc doThis(arg1, arg2: int): int =
      let m = arg1 + 3
      let n = modifyArg(arg2)
      if m > 3:
        echo("bigger!")
      return m+n

With the added bonus that you get compile-time type checking (as well as a fair bit of type inference - notice I didn't have to specify any types other than the function signature), and the code itself compiles down to highly efficient C (https://gist.github.com/tylereaves/8116774 if you're really curious, do remember that code isn't intended to be human readable/modifiable).

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Re:Why use Clojure? by n72 on Tuesday December 24, 2013 @01:57PM (#6960615)

Yeah, in thinking about my example a little more and generalizing, I think one of the problems that people have with reading clojure is that it doesn't have as robust a syntactic indication of scope that other languages have.

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Re:Why use Clojure? by JackMorgan on Tuesday December 24, 2013 @07:26PM (#6961697)

Don't you mean clojure has a MORE robust indication of scope than other languages? In clojure you can nest lets, and it is very obvious when the binding is out of scope, but in c-style languages, once bound, they stay bound till the end of the function.

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Re:Why use Clojure? by TylerE on Tuesday December 24, 2013 @08:09PM (#6961808)

Nope, Nimrod (at least) has full lexical scopes if you want

    proc foo(x: int): int = 
      let z = x * 2
      #z visible
      block:
        let y = z * 4 #z & y visible
      let foo = 3 #z and foo visible, y out of scope

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Re:Why use Clojure? by JackMorgan on Wednesday December 25, 2013 @11:39AM (#6963329)

I said "c-style", not ML style.

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