Hacker News Reader

Clojure does indeed seem like the hot candidate, but to repeat a point that pg has made several times: he's not interested in being 'hot'.

View on HN

Yeah, but it got to the point where I no longer can tell what his goals are for Arc. For a while I thought he was working on the 'hundred year language' dream, but if that is still the goal I'll argue that at the moment Clojure is more of a step in the right direction than Arc.

Interesting; why do you see Clojure as more geared towards that goal than Arc? Although I haven't used Clojure, it seems like more of a compromise intended to bring Lisp to the JVM than a language designed to last into the next century.

I highly recommend at a minimum reading http://clojure.org/rationale for the rationale behind Clojure.

What about Clojure strikes you as being a 'compromise intended to bring Lisp to the JVM'?

> Customers and stakeholders have substantial investments in, and are comfortable with the performance, security and stability of, industry-standard platforms like the JVM.

This very much suggests that Clojure is trying to solve today's problems, not those 100 years in the future.

I think the Lisp + functional programming + concurrency primitives shows a lot more about what kinds of problems Clojure is trying to solve than the fact that it runs on the JVM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com