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by daveliepmann 405 days ago
>I suspect this is the real reason Clojure was created, I bet Rich was just really bored.

I notice too that a noticeable number of people pick up Clojure because it's new and shiny. As a longtime Clojurian I find that attitude can be disappointing to run into, like when you realize a growing friendship will die because they're not serious about living in your city.

I don't claim to know the man but the reasons Rich wanted Clojure are quite concrete, well documented, and rational. Java programs of the time were a particularly heinous form of OOP; we should not be surprised that a clever programmer would grow a preference for a dynamic, functional-first style. He found lisp superior (in interactivity, expressiveness, yadda yadda) and wanted to use it professionally.

To work in lisp required delivering something indistinguishable from a JAR (or other mainstream proglang executable). He had the realization that without immutable data structures baked into the language he'd always be subject to Other People's State.

If you think about these points logically they lead pretty straightforwardly to creating a (pragmatically) functional, dynamic, hosted lisp.

4 comments

I distinctly remember in one of his talks he said words to the effect of “I wrote corporate C++ and Java for years and eventually realised I had to do something else, or else quit the industry”. So he took a year long sabbatical and created Clojure.
I guess that confirms my theory.
Rick wrote jfli, a Java foreign language interface for Common Lisp, before working on Clojure. He was a seasoned lisper, and he wanted to do something both modern and practical.

It's very interesting to go through the bookshelf he read during his sabatical. He was inspired by many languages aside from CL, including Mozart/Oz, AspectJ, and Prolog.

The bookshelf list was originally on Amazon, committed by Rich, but now behind a login wall. However, a Goodreads clone is easy to access: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/137472.Rich_Hickey_s_Clo...

He didn't mean he'd quit out of boredom, he meant he'd quit out of frustration with proglangs that bite you in the ass when writing e.g. concurrent programs
Why not quite the niche though? Clojure doesn't make writing corporate CRUD apps enjoyable.
I don't think the particular niche matters, eventually everything becomes being a mundane job.

I know few people that made it in shiny businesses (Serie A and Champions League players like Fabio Liverani and Simone Pepe, or Massimiliano Rosolino swimming gold metal at Olympics) and they all absolutely either hated or found 99.9% of their career an endless marathon of mundane boring activities.

I'm not saying there aren't plenty of exceptions of people that like their job, and jobs that may make it easier, but it looks to me that most of people find their job mundane and boring most of the time.

Agree. Although, as opposed to physical performance activities, be it sports or music, where one of the key activities is to repeat the same thing thousand times, in software, we strive towards not repeating the same thing.
He wasn't writing corporate CRUD apps, he was working on systems like radio broadcasting, voting machines, and Datomic, which involve significant concurrency challenges.
Incorrect.
As verbose as Java is, it was even worse 20 years ago. If Kotlin, or C# 3.5+ were the OOP lingua francas at the time, maybe there would have been less need to create something else.

But still, "why not"? The first "alt-lang" I remember was "boo", on the dotnet platform. IDK if they actually meant to popularize it, but it had some cool features C# (and J#) didn't have, so, why not?

he said somewhere that he was inspired by Whiteheas's book "Process and Reality"
That was in a talk called "Are we there yet?" where he explains Clojure's time model.
Online version: https://archive.org/details/processreality0000alfr

Author is Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician & philosopher.

He did so much marketing that I believe he wanted to make a consulting business out of it from the day one.