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by dcolkitt 2008 days ago
> After they have gather all the insights they can from Clojure and its ecosystem (which is a worthy endeavor IMO)

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? I've never used Clojure, but have done a fair bit of hacking in other Lisp dialects. Do you (or anyone with an opinion) think there's some insight benefit to Clojure specifically vis-a-vis Racket/Scheme/etc?
2 comments
ithrow 2008 days ago
Production implementations of persistent data structures in an industrial VM plus abstractions for state management, polymorphism, concurrency, the sequence abstraction, etc... It just gives more things for day-to-day programming. While Scheme gives you good foundations, you have to build a lot stuff yourself, it's too primitive (haven't follow Scheme since R5RS). But it's really mostly about the literal data structures and leveraging them anywhere you can to represent information, it's maps everywhere. Data oriented solutions is the common term use in the community. This answer by one the Clojure maintainers sums it up better than me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25377022

Racket extends Scheme with useful stuff too for everyday programming but Clojure's immutable data structures with its big library of functions for manipulating them in a nice abstract generic way, with the fact that in runs in the JVM gives it a big edge for "real world" programming IMO. You do need strong knowledge of Java and the JVM for critical services.

Almost all your knowledge of Racket and Scheme will transfer and be valuable for Clojure, so you already know most of it and have a big head start if you plan to learn it.

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divs1210 2008 days ago
Some of the top reasons for me:

* immutability with persistent data structures

* csp with core.async

* encourages designing a data-driven functional core with an imperative shell

* powerful REPL (better than python / scheme / racket, worse than SBCL)

* multi-platform (backend / browser / mobile through react native)

* easy and comprehensive testing because of several factors: functional nature, dynamic binding of vars, generative testing, etc.

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