[metagame]

There are a lot of people who would debate that point. There are even some fairly common macros that are used when this comes up. My favorite is this one:

«I find Clojure revolting.

It is the most explicit to date abandonment of the age-old Lispers' Dream, "Lisp All The Way Down." Clojure is the antithesis of the Lisp Machine. Instead of a crystalline pyramid of comprehensible mutually-interlocking concepts, behind every Clojure primitive there lurks Black Magic. The Clojure user who is missing some routine or other will run crying to Java for help, rather than implementing the feature himself correctly - that is, as a natural part of the entire language, built on the same concepts. Clojure pisses on everything I've ever loved about Lisp.

Clojure is the False Lisp, which Reeketh of the Cube Farm. A Lisp unworthy of the name; one which encourages users to pepper their code with calls to opaque routines having no underlying Lispiness. A Lisp which barfs Java stack traces. It promotes - no, mandates - the use of undigestable foreign matter in Lisp code: primitives on which you cannot pop the hood to reveal intelligible innards.

The cult of Good Enough which seems to pervade all of modern computing has finally chewed its way through to the Lisp community, with Clojure as the result. I am tired of this abomination being hailed as the future of Lisp. Aficionados of real Lisps, such as myself, will keep hoping, dreaming, and working on systems which do not betray the original virtues of the language.»

[dang]

All: please let's not do programming language flamewar here. I realize this is just a quote, but such things are activating and we all need to just not take the bait.

This sort of hyper-rant did years' worth of damage to the CL community and I'd especially not like to see HN be a vehicle for its return. As for Clojure, Rich knows at least as much as the rest of us do about the design tradeoffs it took to get a viable Lisp on the JVM.

[metagame]

Even pg participated in Lisp flaming; what he said about newLISP on LtU, for example. It's tradition!

But yes, Lisp flamewar is not very productive. I do think there's a debate to be had as to whether or not Clojure is a Lisp, though, and the quote was offered to give a humorous example of a macro posted by people who are against Clojure in it, since stelcodes seemed to be unaware.

[waffletower]

Nice to see software language purists who are not assembly-line stamped Haskellteers fresh out of college. But the fact that they appear unable to see the beauty implied by `/usr/bin/env bb` or `shadow-cljs publish`, suggests to me that they don't recognize the implications of clojure and deep, modern software ecosystem interoperability.

[metagame]

I think most of the people who spam the macro are Emacs Lisp and CL users, so while in the Emacs case they might not understand modern software ecosystem interoperability, they definitely understand deep software ecosystems.

[ithrow]

But the fact that they appear unable to see the beauty implied by `/usr/bin/env bb` or `shadow-cljs publish`

lol, what beauty are you referring to with those two?

Sorry but you aren't any different.

[nathell]

Can you clarify what number you mean by “a lot” and/or cite some research to corroborate this claim?

You quote one article [0], which has been received by the Clojure community with almost unanimous disagreement, as the author himself acknowledges (in less than friendly words).

That article in turn contains little factual information and lots of expressive verbiage. In my experience, this opinion is very much in the minority, albeit a vocal one.

[0]: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42

[metagame]

I quoted a macro that gets spammed on discussion forums. Of course it isn't popular with Clojurists, it mocks them. The origin article is irrelevant. If you copy and paste that paragraph into a search engine, you'll find it on multiple discussion forums.

Go to just about any Lisp forum that isn't explicitly for Clojure, and you'll find people hating on Clojure. Hating on Clojure and hating on newLISP are the only two things that Lisp users can agree on. I like both of them (though I like Clojure a lot less), but I find the slander hilarious and can understand why people disagree that they're real dialects.

[stelcodes]

Wow that’s fascinating. I’m glad I care more about building software than language purity

[neutronicus]

Heh

The impression I gathered from last decade's flirtations with Lisp is that the choice between Clojure and Common Lisp is mostly a choice between whether the code you ultimately call that Gets Stuff Done will be C or Java

[gaze]

whoever wrote that has never finished or contributed substantially to a project.

[lgrapenthin]

This is exactly the kind of closed thinking that is luckily absent from Clojure and the Clojure community and one of the reasons I'd prefer it over any lisp.

[Zababa]

Sure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28831243

[Blackthorn]

How irritating, when people want to talk about things made in Lisp-the-language, and people instead come around to debate Lisp-the-religion.

[metagame]

I think it's hilarious, personally, and I'd disagree that the two are meaningfully distinct.

Acting like any language that makes use of parentheses is a Lisp is similar to the Diogenes plucked chicken allegory. There are a lot of ways in which Clojure clucks like a chicken, to put it in terms of the metaphor. There is definitely room for a debate.

It's like calling Postscript meaningfully a Forth just because the syntax is superficially the same. There's certainly someone in this thread who could give a good thousand word comment on that.