Irreal regulars know that I’ve been exceedingly wishy-washy about learning Clojure. Every time I see a video from Zamansky or someone else using it, I get excited about learning and trying it out. Other times, I get hung up on its running on the JVM and the deviation of its syntax that I’m used to from that of Common Lisp and Scheme.
I was looking through my list of blog post ideas and came across this old piece by Brian Sunter on why he thinks Clojure is a language worth learning. Many of those reasons are common to all Lisps but others are unique to Clojure.
Some of the things I like are support for Go-type channels, very strong interactive programming support, and support for destructuring and pattern matching. But the thing I like the most is something that Sunter doesn’t mention: Clojure—more than Common Lisp or Scheme—has a reasonable claim on being or becoming a mainstream programming language. That’s important because if you want to be a Lisper it’s really hard to find a job using Scheme or Common Lisp. It may be that Clojure offers those who want to do Lisp professionally a chance to do so. I’m not sure we’re there yet but it’s a least possible that Clojure will gain enough traction to be seen as a reasonable choice for projects. Why not? Plenty are people are using Java and, let’s face it, Clojure is a much better language.