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Clojure, like Lisp, has terrible syntax that is difficult for human beings to read. This is one of the reasons the academic community kept Lisp alive - independence from industry, ability to weed out weaker programmers, flexibility.

I'm well aware that I'm posting this on Hacker News, a site founded by an individual who made gazillions on a website powered by Lisp --- I think it is safe to say that it is the exception rather than the rule.

In order to be widely accepted, a language must do many things well enough. If it fails badly at one particular thing, in this case syntax readability, its ability to gain followers will be severely diminished. It may, however, gain a strong following in academia.

If you disagree, then do this thought experiment: who currently uses serious parallel processing power? I can think of a few: Blizzard's WoW servers, government research labs, and bio-informatics operations. How would you convince them to try out Clojure? What problem do they have that Clojure solves so much better than anything else out there that it would gain a foothold?

By the way, I learned CS from Abelson and Sussman and Scheme was my language of choice between 1996 and 2004.




What syntax?

Or to rephrase:

What (scant) syntax there is, I'm in love with.




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