Clojurey

Clojure went 1.0! w00t. And in the meantime, my blog languishes for lack of attention. What kind of blogger am I? to Leave it lying here for so long. Soaking in its own silly juices.But I'm back, for a moment. I must consolidate my web presence; fortify it; make it strong again. But it was never strong to start; yet it will be again! Imagine if James Joyce wrote a blog -- it wouldn't make any sense at all. It shocks me, no... flabergasts me, that one can get anything done in Clojure, cause afterall, it is a "functional" language; and aren't functional languages all universally useless? Don't functional languages just burn up cpu? It must be as the Great Maestro Hickey states: that Clojure is the most friendly face ever put to a functional language. Clojure is easier than Haskell because it doesn't have Monads. There was a guy... Ted Neward (I think) who said that the only way a functional language can ever take off outside academia is if it doesn't have monads. F# doesn't have monads, and look how well it is doing. And neither does Clojure, so it's sure to be a success. Instead of Monads, Clojure has mutable reference types; in that sense, it deviates from being a pure functional language. However, the semantics for mutating said reference types are strictly defined by the language -- it's not anarchy, not like Java. Clojure is much safer. The only way you can get yourself into trouble is my calling out to Java; if only Clojure had an effects system: then I would label all my Java code impure and be done with it. That'd be tricky though, being that Clojure is dynamic and everything. I've written several thousand lines of Clojure in the past few months, and its so dynamic: it could change any minute. In fact, as anyone who has ever worked with me will tell you, it does change every minute. and every half a minute. and not just little bits change. no, the whole thing changes. constant mutation! Most of it I've written over and over again in sundry different ways, since it took me a while to figure out what I was doing. But it's always that way with strange new languages. Some people are lulled into thinking that one programming language is much like another -- but it isn't so. C and Java and C++ and all those other gross static imperative languages may all seem pretty much the same, but beyond their provincial pale is a whole galaxy of strange and unnatural languigy artifice. I recall that Shakespeare line about living in a nutshell and thinking yourself king of infinite space. That's how people get. I'm probably that way. Clojure isn't nearly as hardcore as Haskell; I know, I've tried to write Haskell: and I've failed. You'll fail too! and if you don't fail... well.... then shame on you for being so smart. Remember, it wasn't me, it was Ted Neward who said: No Monads!