Rich Hickey on Clojure

It is interesting to hear the creator of a language talking about how the language came to be.

As he describes it, he created Clojure as a way to update, and optimize a Lisp in order not to become mainstream, like Python, Java, C, etc, but to be a powerful tool so scientists can perform important work in an elegant and simple way.

For instance he describes the way the information is being manipulated in a very optimized and simple way. Basically by sacrificing memory space he optimized de speed upon which the operations are executed in a way that makes the information persistent, immutable, and fast.

Although not very optimal for space, this increases speed by a lot. Also the innate implementation of data structures such as atom and Java libraries for big numbers. Makes the mathematical implementation of complex and big operations super easy for scientists and specialists to develop important work.

I agree with Dick, Clojure is a powerful language, and in some ways with the analogy that he gives, about if you had to explain someone a code in Java, it would be really difficult and we just have accepted that reality, and because of this most of us, me included, dismissed it almost immediately because it looked weird and in my indoctrinated eyes it did not look like a normal language.

Most of the times I still think looks weird and get frustrated about the syntax. However, I must admit is a very powerful language with a unique implementation. And it has given me a new interest in how to program efficiently and abstractly. High order functions have been always been present in my repertoire ever since I started programming in C. And multithreading is something I consider personally very important for a program to be perfect. And this language already has native implementation, more than surprised I am impressed.