> I would very much like to read a comparison of CL and Clojure from the author at some point. As it seems he is offering a fair comparison.
I suspect the authors main problem with Clojure is, that it is a mostly functional language which heavily emphasizes doing things in the functional way and discouraging imperative programming whereas CL is more like a true multiparadigm language.
I used to think that multiparadigm is best, but after migrating from Scheme which is mostly functional but has a lot of mutation and a sad lack of interesting datastructures apart from Lisp to Clojure which has good support for dicts and persistent data structures I think I prefer a community that is more focused on one approach.
That's not a very nice thing to do, suspecting people without any kind of evidence. Not to mention the fact that there is a `set!` form in Clojure, which makes it entirely possible to write very imperative code (and thread-local semantics don't matter in single-threaded programs).
Anyway, "problems with Clojure" can be very different for different people. I like Clojure design as a language - even its interop with OO host features are very neat - but then when I want to hack some simple script in a REPL I not only need to write this:
but then I need to wait for freaking 6 seconds for the prompt to appear. 6 seconds. I don't know what more I could write here, so I'll just paste this (Chicken Scheme):
$ time csi -e '(exit)'
csi -e '(exit)' 0,01s user 0,00s system 81% cpu 0,007 total
So that's my problem with Clojure, nothing to do with "functional way", right?
> So that's my problem with Clojure, nothing to do with "functional way", right?
Sure. For a solution to your particular problem, maybe ClojureScript will bring some improvement for CLI use, since Nodejs tends to start faster than a whole JVM.
I feel the need to chime in: working in a language where the assumption is that everyone has agreed on a functional approach makes it much easier to stick to that approach myself. And, of course, reading other people's source code makes that much more sense.
I seem to remember his comments on some Lisp list on usenet or something, but I might be wrong, in which case I'm sorry and didn't mean to discredit the article's author in any way (I think that Pascal Costanza is a nice and smart fellow, and always had a positive impression of his posts, and Lisp communities used to be terrible places).
