Comment by pdub1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdub1 | Hacker News Reader

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I've tried Clojure.

I prefer a programming language that allows me to pick and choose which paradigms I want to follow-- whether OOP or FP, mutable or immutable, etc. I don't need Clojure to do that for me.

Personally, I am trying to figure out why a closed source language is producing such activism-- trying to increase the popularity importance of the language... despite the fact that it's a privately owned language-- not really "open source"-- everything flows through one man & his company, which come first & above, regarding the language's development.

Rich Hickey: [Paraphrasing] "Open source isn't about you. I created this, it's mine, and I'll change it when and how I choose."

Clojure Community: "Hey, let's try to get more people into Clojure! Let's increase this community!"

I can understand your frustration about Rich's development process. But clojure is most definitely not closed source. The source is right here: https://github.com/clojure/clojure and the license that allows you to copy, modify, and redistribute that source is here: https://opensource.org/licenses/eclipse-1.0.php

Rich has a fairly strict development approach and wants to personally review and approve all changes to the core. There are complaints about that process, and that's fair. But as far as I have seen, most large, successful projects have similar personalities leading them (Stallman, Linus, Larry Wall, Guido...).

Finally, I should add -- if what you are looking for is software freedom... then you should absolutely consider using a Lisp like clojure. Lisp's give you the power to control your language through macros and non-core libraries. Unlike other languages, you do not need a core development team to make language changes for you. Perhaps this is why clojure is so powerful... because the core process issues you have heard about are not actually that important, and in fact the language itself enables substantially more software freedom than perhaps you are giving it credit for.

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