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Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much experience in CL, but I started to really like the fact that clojure is Lisp 1. When I have a hash map "client", I can use all three:

(get client :phone)

(:phone client)

(client :phone)

It takes some getting used to, but I already came to expect (and enjoy) that any symbol I use can be a function.

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in cl, you can use defsetf to almost do the same. as a matter of fact, taking a cue from arc, you can write a macro like:

  (defmacro deftable (name)
    `(progn
       (defparameter ,name (make-hash-table))
       (defun ,name (k)
         (gethash k ,name))
       (defsetf ,name (k) (v)
         `(setf (gethash ,k ,',name) ,v))))

now you can do: (deftable client), which creates the hashtable, and then

(client 'phone) will retrieve the value,

(setf (client 'phone) '4444444) will set the value.

I also think that reading lots of "funcall"s makes the intent of the code less readily apparent.

it is definitely more verbose and uglier. but in practice it does not seem to be a problem. for instance, comparing to arc, if you had notfn for ~, and testify, you could write all as:

  (defun all (test seq)
    (funcall (notfn #'some) (complement (testify test)) seq))

doesn't seem that bad.

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