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by slightlyCyborg 3261 days ago
I am learning Common Lisp after using Clojure exclusively for a year.

Common Lisp may be old, but it is extremely powerful relative to Clojure IMO. Clojure startup times are awful, it takes a very opinionated approach to programming (immutable data), its debugger is buggy, it produces unsightly error messages.

Sure, these problems may be fixed, but for me, I want a powerful tool that I can use now.

I've tried several new hot languages at the time (Rust, Dart, Clojure, Go).

I have come to a point in my career where I want to stick to highly complex, but slightly dusty artifacts defined by a standard( C++ & ANSI Common Lisp).

The SBCL implementation of common lisp does not give me all of the headaches of Clojure. I also don't have to restart the repl to load libs.

On using another dynamic language that isn't a lisp... Forget about it.

...Python maybe for machine learning, but I will probably just wrap cafe in CL or something.

PS. I am 25. Seems relevant to this discussion.

1 comments

>I have come to a point in my career where I want to stick to highly complex, but slightly dusty artifacts defined by a standard( C++ & ANSI Common Lisp).... . . >PS. I am 25. Seems relevant to this discussion.

This made me LOL. I figured you were 50 or older based on the top of your post. You are wise to pick languages that are proven and "just work " though. I would say Go, while young, is incredibly stable and predictable.