Comment by swannodette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swannodette | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think it's an unfair comparison at all. Comparing Clojure and Scala can only generate interest in a few small (though growing) communities.

You've done an excellent job of showing Clojure's benefits to a much, much wider audience - programmers not familiar with functional programming. Also it's compelling to hear that you're successfully using Clojure to efficiently "script" larger Java codebases.

Kudos for writing such a hype-less, non-condescending, and educational tutorial for Java/imperative programmers!

Thanks swannodette, very kind of you! Yes, it's been cool to layer Clojure on top of legacy Java and see what happens. Some want to sell Clojure as "a better Java than Java"... I think that may be a little misguided. But, there are certain situations where it rings true... at least IMHO

I don't think Clojure's goal is to be "better Java". Rather, that for whatever task you might consider Java, writing that task in Clojure should be:

  * easier to write
  * perform just as well
  * be concurrency safe

Clojure isn't there yet, but it's well on its way I think.

it's easier to have unsafe concurrency in clojure. It's certainly easier to get it right by default than in java, but it's still very easy to introduce a race condition or some such.

Typo, I meant easy not easier

true but you can use it to script java witch would be better then doing it in java.

Clojure isn't really 'layered on Java'; it does however run in the JVM (just like Java).

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