This podcast answered many of the doubts I had after listening to last week’s podcast on Lisp. First of all, although I haven’t done much in Clojure, so far it hasn’t been a hard language to get a good grasp on, contrary to what Dick Gabriel said on the previous podcast. Perhaps its because I’ve only been programming for a few years, and I haven’t yet found a language that I consider better than the rest, so the process of adapting and changing my mindset wasn’t as hard as he had made it out to be. I think Rich Hickey is much more on the nose as to why Lisp hadn’t taken off in popularity: it wasn’t easy to use with everything else.
With Clojure, since it runs on the Java Virtual Machine, it’s way easier for someone to just try it for a small part of what they’re working on, and they’re more likely to fall in love with how it works, or simply understand that functional programming has its uses and keep it in mind for future projects. I think Hickey did a very good job identifying the reasons Lisp wasn’t as successful as some people believed it would be, and he did a really great job fixing it and making it more accessible.
Clojure was scary to get started on, because its lack of “structure” makes it difficult to read to someone who has never seen it. At least that’s how I felt when I started this course, and I don’t imagine I would’ve ever tried it out for a project on my own, since it’s usually easier to stick to what you’re familiar with. However, after having learned its basics, I will definitely consider functional programming in my future endeavors, and I think the same applies to most people who have given any Lisp languages a try, a number that will only get bigger as languages like Clojure keep popping up and make this way of thinking more mainstream.
No comments:
Post a Comment