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Comment by alexatkeplar | Hacker News Reader

This is an entertaining comparison of 8 different map-reduce languages for Hadoop, including a flame-tastic take on Cascalog/Clojure: http://www.dataspora.com/2011/04/pigs-bees-and-elephants-a-c...

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"LISP has been around some 50-odd years without taking off despite several attempts at its revival... I suspect something is wrong with it"

I laughed out loud at that.

The guy is a genuinely funny writer, incredibly rare in tech. If you find anything else written by him, let me know.

The problem is, I'm not sure that line was actually meant to be funny.

That's not flame-tastic. It's just inaccurate.

well, i'd agree it's "entertaining"! had fun reading that, thanks.

As someone who would like to start experimenting with Hadoop in near future, I would appreciate it a lot if you could elaborate on that or point me in the direction of a better comparison.

Personally, I dislike LISP odd syntax, the widespread use of side effects in a functional language and the poor abstraction that lists represent over RAM, from a performance point of view — indeed LISP variants often add additional data structures, somehow negating the “LIS” part of the language. In the specific case of Clojure, the fact that a compiled language is compiled into an interpreted one, JVM bytecode, combining a slow dev cycle with suboptimal performance, makes me think Clojure users must be glutton for punishment.

Clojure has sophisticated state management. So much for widespread use of side effects.

Clojure has high performance data structure implementations tuned for modern hardware. So much for performance.

Clojure is compiled on the fly at the REPL and the JVM is one the fastest runtimes out there. So much for slow dev cycle.

You may not like the syntax, but boy is that Hadoop query short and sweet.

Yeah it's almost hilarious how every critic he is aiming at LISP is fixed in Clojure, where immutable is the default and vector the data structure of choice. Also he clearly doesn't understand the subtleties/differences between compilation and interpretation, and how the two can interlace.

He got Nathan Marz' name wrong, too.

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