Rich Hickey on Clojure

At first is mentioned the basics of Lisp and its advantages among others languages. Rich mentioned that programs are represented to the compiler as data structures this could also be translated as “programming and metaprogramming are the same thing”.
Rich says that Lisp is not designed for being a mainstream language instead is was designed to be used  for super users, scientists and very hard problems resolutions with less resources. The advantages of using Lisp are it was mentioned before, programs are represented as data structures, also t when the compiler is compiling your program it gives your other macros the chance to run during the compilation process which basically means that your program writing programs can be integrated within the compiler.


Syntactic extensibility is one of the best features that Lisp has to offer because thanks to this you do not have to re-write the same code again and again like in other languages, where you have to write many time a part of the code.
Clojure was designed to improve Lisp communications with other programs, because this was one of the main problems with Lisp, so rich had the idea of developing Clojure which retains the power of lisp and allow accessing to Java libraries.
In conclusion Lisp is oriented to solving problems that need a different approach and Clojure is for any programmer with an open minded.
I think Clojure was an excellent idea in order to try to become Lisp a more used Language.
References
Software Engineering Radio. (2010). Episode 158: Rich Hickey on Clojure. [Podcast]. Available at http://www.se-radio.net/2010/03/episode-158-rich-hickey-on-clojure/

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

The Promises of Functional Programming

Computer Science development has been changing though the computing history, so is very difficult to understand this kind of absatract problems, evenmore if you have been coding in the same way for years. Computing and mathematical advantages allow us to create better hardware that help us to develop more sofisticated software.  In the 1950s John McCarthy designed a  complete new coding method:  functional programming,  based on Alonso Church’s mathematical theory . Functional programming  has advantages for parallel programming. In this article the author tries to explain what  functional programming  is and its differences with  imperative programming,  for this he used Clojure to give examples about  functional programming. There are huge differences between both programming methods, but that doesn’t mean that one is better than the other. Each one has its pros and cons, and you should be able to determine when to use one over the other. The principal funcionality 
Leer más

Triumph of the Nerds Part II

The one topic that i found most interesting in this video was how IBM used the inverse-engineering as a strategy to get back in tecnological businesses. IBM was noticing how Apple was growing their company very fast, by the sells of the Apple 2, so their will be able of being part of this competition. As IBM was incapable of producing a whole new computer in less than a year, their use something named inverse-engineering whic is the procees in which you take something that is already desing and start disarming it piece by piece in order to understand how its working and then replicate it. This was legal only if the engierniring you use to disarmed and rebuild the machine were completely "virgin" of the knowledge of the ROM BIOS, the term virgin was refering that you do not have any kind of study or you werent part of the procedure of builduing this machine. This is how IBM was able to build a new machine in less than a year and avoid being lost in this war. But he start
Leer más

The Semicolon Wars

The Semicolon Wars As the author tried to explain at the beginning of his paper, scientists have worked hard to find the "perfect" programming language that describes a problem or a data structure in the best possible way. Given this goal, an endless war has developed in decide which programming language best fits this goal. Which the author considers an unnecessary and ridiculous fight. On the other hand I consider that the programming languages ​​are evolving each one of them to achieve this programming language "perfect" although we can not deny that each of these programming languages ​​are different from each others because they can solve in different ways different problems, although, each one provides advantages and disadvantages. Later in the paper, the author suggests that all programming languages ​​have the same computational power, so that the fight is really in deciding which allows you to express your algorithm, to clarify this, begins to compare
Leer más