> but it will win in the next 15 years in a major way,
> because it is already one of the most interesting
the most interesting ... what?Anyway, I think they have already won in a major way: The managed to build a community which is supportive and friendly. This is a huge deal when you have a look at the poisonous behaviours of individuals and the wide-spread arrogance typical in most Lisp communities. Before I learned about Clojure, I certainly wouldn't have believed it if someone told me that there was a Lisp-like language without the pretentious assholes. > An enterprise Scala project, for example, is typically
> going to present the frustrations that come with
> components that live outside the language. Learning Scala
> isn’t that bad, but Maven and Spring and Hibernate? Ouch.
> In Clojure, most of the typically “external” needs are
> provided with idiomatic libraries that can be reasoned
> about within the language.
That doesn't make much sense. One can do exactly the same in Scala. The big improvement on Clojure is that it is completely pain-free and seamless to keep the old components around and migrate gradually to better solutions (or just keep the legacy parts which work – why bother changing it?). > while every static language worth its salt has an
> interactive mode (“REPL”) it doesn’t have the same
> first-class-citizen feel
Maybe this has changed, but the last time I used Clojure's REPL, it was completely unusable, with basic things like auto-completion, history and navigation being completely non-functional.I think the opinion voiced in the article is interesting, but past experience tells us that the chances of a Lisp to get even slightly popular is low to non-existing. |
Is that really true of most Lisp communities, or just Common Lisp's?