Interview with Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure
simple-talk.com
simple-talk.com
"I think programmers have become inured to incidental complexity... when they encounter complexity, they consider it a challenge to overcome, rather than an obstacle to remove.
Overcoming complexity isn't work, it's waste."
This is a useful maxim for me. I have definitely been attracted to complexity that was really incidental in programming.
"Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?"
This couldn't be more true and becomes clearly apparent when moving from languages that require compile-deploy-run cycles.
I like the fact that he chose the word "focus" here, the main reason for my comment. People usually use the general term "productivity". Focus is a really important and usually overlooked advantage of the interactive style of development.
Lisp and the ability to use Java to "get things done" is not to be underestimated I think. Not to mention it's hugely useful as a java repl. Just being able to play with java classes from the repl helps me in my day to day java development.
But part of clojures value is that it isn't the java mindset. Boilerplate just melts away in clojure. That might not be relevant to its use as a java repl but it greatly enhances your productivity as a jvm programmer.