Rich Hickey on Clojure

-
After listening to Rich Hickey on Clojure, I can agree with Rich on some topics. The main challenge for Rich is to make people understand that Clojure is very simple and that there are not as many rules as they might imagine. Clojure has many benefits, and Rich Hickey talks about one in specific: metaprogramming. Many of Lisp features are list, and being able to create programs from programs, programs from many things are great. Metaprogramming has to be used carefully.

Java might be a simple programming language and used by more people than Lisp but Lisp has an advantage over Java. Using Lisp, specifically, Clojure will be simpler than Java thanks to the implementation of lots of functions in the Sequence API. 

Rich Hickey also refers to the differences between Lisp and Clojure, with which I agree with some of them. First, Clojure is unique because the program is presented as data structures and not as a text to the compiler. Clojure has also more structures than only lists, for examples, vectors, and maps. Rich also says that one difference between Clojure and Lisp popularity is that Clojure retains Lisp power by including access to Java's libraries and many people know Java and its libraries very good. Finally, Rich says that Clojure's main characteristic is that the core data structures are immutable, the built-in library is made in terms of abstraction and non-concrete data structures, protocols, persistent data structures, and reference types, this might be kind of confusing by reading but it is very important for Clojure's working. 

I really liked this podcast because it talks about many important points that we don't know about lisp and after every reading or listening during this almost 3 months of working with Clojure, I keep learning more and more about this programming language and about different technologies like imperative languages. An imperative language is not something usually talked about in the programming area and it can be sometimes kind of difficult to work with but thanks to JVM, Clojure is a programming language which might become a powerful tool for using it in projects, or in any other activity. I want to improve my programming skills to become a better programmer by using Clojure. 

References: 

- Episode 158: Rich Hickey on Clojure, retrieved on September 22th, 2018 from: http://www.se-radio.net/2010/03/episode-158-rich-hickey-on-clojure/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Roots of Lisp

-
After reading Paul Graham "The Roots of Lisp", I realized that there is a lot of information and knowledge that I still have to learn. Starting with John McCarthy's paper showing that with some simple operators and notation for functions you can create a programming language, which he named LISP (List Processing), I must say that I had no idea of the origin of the name, but thanks to the reading I understood that this name is because it uses a simple data structure (list) for code and data.  McCarthy's discovery changed the way the programming languages were created, with Lisp created, now there were two models of programming: C model and Lips model. The evolution in computer's performance and hardware has made that the new programming languages move to the Lisp model.  Graham explains some important terms that McCarthy created, starting with an expression which is also an atom and made by a sequence of letters or a list of zero or more expressions separ
Read more

The Promises of Functional Programming

-
After reading "The Promises of Functional Programming" by Konrad Hinsen, I found some interesting parts of the reading and with which I agree. Konrad says that there is a big future if people use functional programming languages.  Konrad Hinses explains some disadvantages of using functional programming languages which are very important and interesting. Functional programming has advantages for concurrent and parallel programming and we can see those differences clearly with Clojure. First, the paradigm of functional programming can be a little difficult if you have been programming on the object-oriented paradigm, for example, learning the mathematical structure of functional programming might be hard, such as stop using loops and instead use recursion for the iterations, also high-order functions is also difficult to learn and understand. Functional programming languages let you write more robust software and with functional programming languages, you don't use
Read more