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by labrador 221 days ago
That's a great suggestion I had forgotten about, which is strange since I'm a C# programmer. Part of me wants to really learn a Lisp to see what it is special about it that I keep hearing about. I tried Racket and Steel Bank Common Lisp but they didn't seem appropriate for the commercial programming I'm used to. Clojure is being used commercially.
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bmitc 221 days ago
I also really like Lisps/Schemes. I've always wanted to pick up Clojure but don't like how it thinly sits on top of the JVM compared to F# being deeply integrated. I always had trouble getting Clojure properly installed compared to just downloading .NET and having F# or easily downloading Racket.

You should absolutely try out F#. :) It's a great language.

Also, if you're looking for the magic of Lisp/Scheme, I think you might really enjoy Elixir/Erlang. Elixir has macros, has purely immutable data (there is _no_ way whatsoever to get mutable data unlike F#, Racket, Clojure, etc.), live code updates, and the BEAM VM, its process framework, and OTP are quite magical.

When I first learned Erlang, I felt I had come home. I mainly used Elixir though due to the available packages and jobs.

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labrador 221 days ago
The late great Joe Armstrong is missed! Good suggestion, I will take a look at Elixer/Erlang. It's the least I can do for the laughs Joe gave me in his videos.
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macintux 221 days ago
Shameless plug if you like videos: I gave a talk about Erlang, building the language (focus on semantics, not syntax) up from the fact that the = sign doubles as a runtime assertion.

https://youtu.be/E18shi1qIHU

Joe was indeed a great guy. I was lucky enough to spend some private time with him when he was visiting Chicago to give a talk, a true renaissance man with wide-ranging interests.

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labrador 221 days ago
Good talk! I didn't believe that Go example was real at first. A bit strange. I always think of Alan Kay's message passing objects when listening to descriptions of Erlang and tonight I also thought about Kubernetes pods. The other thought is one you touched on is that some systems are monolithic so you have to handle errors. Thanks, I enjoyed that.
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bmitc 220 days ago
This would be the Elixir talk I'd watch to get excited about it: https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE
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