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Should I learn Lisp before Clojure?
There are people who think Clojure is replacing Lisp.
Clojure is often condemned as slow, though. Lisp is efficient.
It is also heaven for those who love ellipses and parenthesis. And Lisp has been around
forever.
I thought that was about 50 years.
Ten years is forever on the internet, and Lisp predates the internet.
I read that Clojure was an update of Lisp.
Its disadvantage is its newness. It needs to mature a little.
What? Another year until it is taken seriously?
Common Lisp is embedded in IT because of things like ANSI Common Lisp as an IT standard.
Lisp in some ways is more flexible than Clojure, treating data and functions the same, while
letting you build your own programming language.
In some ways, learning Clojure would be better than learning Lisp. Clojure is a lot more
disciplined than Lisp, maybe picking that up from Haskell.
Is Clojure more practical than Haskell?
Oh, very much so. Clojure is an active language that runs on JVM.
JVM is golden, assuming you can use it to access their libraries.
Yes, which is where Clojure is better than Lisp. And then there is the fact that you
can extend the code as data system beyond lists to vectors and maps.
That’s a map to heaven for true IT nerds.
Whereas Common Lisp doesn’t officially agree to get along with Java or JVM.
Do you think Clojure would replace Common Lisp?
They are rivals, to be sure. But I don’t think Clojure will become the official Common
Lisp replacement.
Why not? I thought Clojure made programmers more efficient.
So does Ruby on Rails, but that doesn’t mean it makes good code. You can make good
time on the highway because you’re going the wrong direction.
Which language should I learn?
Learn Clojure first. You can study Lisp later, whether to upgrade someone’s code to Clojure
or as a history lesson.