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Comment by mjw | Hacker News Reader

The keyword syntax is transformed into a keyword instance by the reader, and keyword instances implement IFn as objects on the JVM, hence can be used as functions under clojure's evaluation rules.

As I understand it, the roles which things like lists and functions play in a traditional lisp are replaced in Clojure by abstract datatypes corresponding to Java interfaces. Which on one hand is kinda neat because the core lisp datatypes aren't tied to specific concrete implementations and other datatypes (including user-defined ones) can participate in the same abstractions.

On the other hand it means the semantics become quite tied up in underlying JVM-related details and don't seem as clean/elegant as (say) Scheme.

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    On the other hand it means the semantics 
    become quite tied up in underlying JVM-related 
    details and don't seem as clean/elegant as (say) 
    Scheme.

That's not very true. Instead, Clojure is defined in terms of specific abstractions. Whether those take the form of interfaces or protocols is irrelevant because it's the abstractions that count. If it were tied strictly to JVM-related details then ClojureScript would have been much harder to implement than it was.

The elegance of Scheme is subjective.

You have to use the java interop facilities if you want your own types to implement these abstractions though right?

I recall some debate about changing this so you can implement them using the native abstraction facilities in clojure (protocols), at which point I'd probably withdraw my point.

But yeah elegance is subjective. I use Clojure and broadly like it, JVM interop is really useful, but the lack of a crisp separation between clojure semantics and JVM semantics does still irk the purist in me a bit.

I guess I'd see Clojure and ClojureScript not as one language on two host platforms, but as one JVM language and another similar but not really source-compatible language on another platform which is influenced by it. Part of the philosophy seems to be to make pragmatic decisions which blur the boundary with the host platform, rather than try to abstract over the differences in APIs and runtime semantics.

I'm still a clojure newb, but if I understand you correctly:

>> I recall some debate about changing this so you can implement them using the native abstraction facilities in clojure (protocols)

You mean records (defrecord): http://clojure.org/datatypes

Not quite, I'm talking about replacing the various important java interfaces in clojure.lang (IFn, ISeq, IPersistentMap etc) with protocols, so you can implement them yourself without using any Java-specific language features.

Dunno how feasible this is, but if a language is going to define its own abstraction features (here, protocols) on top of the underlying platform, it would seem cleaner to eat ones own dogfood in using these abstraction facilities for the core abstractions which the language and its core library are based on.

I more than agree with your last paragraph.

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