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by taikahessu 1725 days ago
This is exactly what I've been thinking of lately. I started web development in 1998 and in 2000 I got searching for some way to store data.

At first I tried Macromedia Coldfusion, later acquired by Adobe. Now that I checked on it, it seems to be going strong, to my surprise. It was too hard for me. And it was closed software. There was no way for me to learn it without spending money on it. And it wasn't what I was really looking for.

But I just needed something simple. Something to tinker with. So I found PHP. It was exactly what I needed at the time. Later I also found MySQL.

The amount of garbage required to build a single website is enormous. So enormous that we have gone a full circle and people start using static site generators to create pure HTML sites. Because of speed and few other reasons.

So I got to thinking, why is it that we're building webshops with all these open source technologies, with a huge amount of overhead and "bloat", when all you really need is a few simple things.

Well, as the creator said it, there are a lot of unknowns. Huge learning curve etc. But that's how Linux got started, as a tinkering platform. I really think this is the right path to take. Making an open source web programming language, that handles all the needs directly built-in. I totally agree with the philosophy and if you will, proposed abstraction, of the problem at hand.

But also, it makes me shiver to look at the code and not understand it. So much to learn. But it gives me hope to see, that other's have come to the same conclusions. Looking forward to hearing more!

1 comments

Clojure (and Lisps in general) really aren't hard to learn. It just takes those of us that come from C-influenced languages like PHP a little longer to be able to read them at a glance because the syntax is slightly different and usually simpler.

Once that lightbulb of the power of a Lisp goes off, there's no turning back. As Eric S. Raymond said, "Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

The best tip I ever got for reading Clojure was to ignore the parens and look at the indentation.
If there was one and only one thing I could tell myself from 15 years to do sooner it's LEARN SCHEME. Man I wish I'd stated a decade ago.