Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

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(this is not only about you)

Its funny to me how people often say after 5/10/whatever years of java I conclude that its limitations are [insert your limitations]

Why the hell did it take you 10 years? If you work with a language for a year MAX and you can still not creat good abstractions. Why do you stick to it?

The guy that made Ceylon said something like that too.

(Sure your job could be java, but I think most people here do programming in there freetime as well. Why did you not move to CL, Haskell, ML, python or something. If more people would have done that these languages would be a lot better of now)

Edit: An example: Alot of wat you get from clojure you could of gotten from CL 10 years ago. Why didn't more people think of this that way?

At least we can agree on the point that clojure is awesome and that we are really happy to have scala and clojure today.

Why did it take me 10 years? Because I had 10 years less experience 10 years ago. I was a C++ developer with only a couple years of professional programming experience. At that point, Java was the new upstart with the promise of GC and libs that actually worked across platforms. I grew up along with Java and learned a lot along the way. As a professional programmer, I didn't know anyone that used anything but C++ or Java. CL was not a career choice (I'm still hard-pressed to say that it is).

I spent many years building some pretty good production software in Java and it certainly paid my mortgage and let me grow in important ways. I did tinker in the background with Ruby, Erlang, Python, Groovy, etc etc and tried to bring them in as testing tools or whatever when I could. There are still many things I like about Java and working in Java obviously makes your work available to a vast number of programmers.

I feel incredibly lucky that Clojure (and Scala and ...) are possible choices now and that I've managed to get to an experience level where I can make the judgement to recommend it and have an employer listen to me.

I do apologize for not personally making the majority of the industry use Common Lisp 10 years ago. My bad.

You don't have to be this rude :)

Some people use Java in spite of the language: they just like the vast libraries.

did it have all these libs 10 years ago too?

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