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Comment by rgbrgb | Hacker News Reader

This is definitely a question worth asking. I think the audience ClojureScript is most appealing to is those who are already writing server-side stuff in Clojure and want to have a consistent front end or "old-school Lisp hackers" who are now writing web applications.

Personally, I'm attracted to Lisp/Clojure because of its AI history but haven't put the time in to build anything real with it yet. Are there people who have switched away from (Node || Python || Ruby) && JS who could discuss their experience?

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I've done Ruby for years and I've written one large commercial project in clojure. Clojure was great, and I would love to use it more, but I haven't been able to convince people to use a lisp.

It's very strange actually, I tried really hard to do a small project in clojure at my current job and got resistance from everyone. These same people were happy to try coffee script, scala, golang, etc, etc. There seems to be a true bias against lisps.

Personally, all I can say is: Other people can choose to accept or reject parentheses. As people who know and understand the power and inherent elegance of the language we need to skip the step where we yearn for recognition and go straight to the "doing really fantastic stuff and making you jealous" portion of the narrative.

We dote too much on the history of Lisp w/r/t Clojure IMO. Clojure is not CL. Clojure is not Scheme. Clojure is not Haskell. Clojure is Clojure. It has its own state, identity, and time. Make great stuff with it and other people will follow. My feeling is that was need to quit waiting for approval and simply draw the line in the sand. I would be happy to forfeit future programming job opportunities if it meant committing to a language that solves the problems I care about. Will everyone do that? Unlikely. Will the people who know better than to settle for second best do it? I have a feeling the answer there is closer to yes.

The joke is, David Wheeler demonstrated years ago that you don't need most of the parens:

http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html

It wouldn't be too hard to develop an indentation-based dialect of Clojure.

This is well known and has allready been done for clojure (cant remember where I saw it).

There are problems with this syntax when you combine it with macros. There is some work done to solve this but not much. For a (theoretical) lisp that works this way, see here: http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/

Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk from Strange Loop is filled with great ammo: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

Personally, it gave me new vocabulary and conceptual tools for explaining why I like Clojure so much.

Oddly, the thing that triggers ire seems to be the presence of a left paren at the start of a line. (Many constructs in Clojure involve fewer parens than the same construct in Java, so the mere number of parens is therefore not a reason to avoid Clojure.)

People see parens and freak out. I once interviewed a guy who said his least favorite language was Lisp. I didn't know it was at the bottom of anybody's list!

That's really interesting to hear a real-world example. Can you say more about the reasons they gave you?

The contexts are all different. A VP told me that he had a bunch of mediocre programs and it would be hard from them to use it, and hard to hire new programmers. A friend of mine who tries new languages all the time simply doesn't like it cause it's a lisp. A Director at a different company didn't say clearly, but it seemed to boil down to it being a lisp. H was fine with us trying Scala or even golang, but no clojure.

Pros and cons. Switching away from a mainstream language is hard; you lose the community and all the work going to it. But you gain a lot of technical power, and possibly find a small community of really smart people.

Sometimes you can get the best of both worlds by doing something like ClojureScript, which is to compile to a mainstream language. That is compelling.

In the end, Lisp is really powerful, it's better than other languages, and it's worth learning. If you can deal with the lack of a huge community, you'll be fine. Clojure is gaining quite a large following, actually, so it's one of the best environments to learn Lisp.

I’m a Clojure user that switched from Python. We’re now using it at the startup I founded. So far it seems to have been a great decision.

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