alt Hacker NewsWith respect, this topic in particular has been beaten to death.
I too liked Clojure when I tried it some years ago (agreed on the composition and data structures; both are _great_). But the real value-add is in the runtime, not the syntax. Java has a solid runtime but it's not yet as good as Erlang's, maybe even not up to the standards of Golang -- I am talking concurrency / parallelism here (for memory management I have no doubts Java is very good). And I know: green threads and stuff. Well, call me when you can do what Erlang / Golang can do. Then I'll look again, very seriously too.
Programming language syntax scarcely matters. It does to some extent but we the programmers tend to over-romanticize it. The runtime and its properties are the much better thing to optimize for.
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When it comes to concurrency, what can golang's runtime do that is so special? When I tried it, it seemed like a worse version of Erlang's for people that prefer C style syntax. Depending upon your design space pervasive immutability is a huge boon too and golang doesn't have that but Clojure does - Erlang obviously having that and more.
I always wished clojerl took off.
Yeah, the content + feel felt like I'm reading this in 2013.
Nothing wrong with that, it's a good thing that stuff is discovered anew [as opposed to being lost/forgotten], but it did bring a smile to me.
Are JVM virtual threads not on par with golangs's concurrency? I think core.async even uses virtual threads now
> Programming language syntax scarcely matters. It does to some extent but we the programmers tend to over-romanticize it. The runtime and its properties are the much better thing to optimize for.
I'm not sure I understand this argument. Java and Clojure share a runtime, but an idiomatic Java codebase is going to have a very different architecture and design to an idiomatic Clojure codebase. Conversely, a codebase written in Go may end up looking very similar to a codebase written in Java, despite using different runtimes.