Rich Hickey on Clojure

The first thing that is noticeable, at least for me, we are talking now about Clojure not about Lisp (Even when they’re similar) that may be not that impactful, but we’re learning Clojure not its parent, so makes me a little more comfortable.

The first differentiation that the interviewee find between Lisp and the discussed language is the data structures that can be used as fundamentals, in this case we can use not vectors and maps, not only lists. Topic that might not seem that important, but it is useful for some purposes.

Also, the concept that they talk about the nature of the language is interesting, when the aboard the topic of why Lisp didn’t become popular or mainstream Rich gives us a new perspective about the defects that he can find for Lisp, such as its isolation (because of the lack of libraries) and that it was designed for making hard and intense problems easier to solve. The macros appear again here when their talking about the differentiator of Lisp.

This great explanation about the “non-Object Oriented Programming” of Clojure, that you can find the functionality of the OOP not explicitly, but the idea could be found on Clojure. The way they explore a simple comparison between Java and Clojure, not only limited to the time and development capacity, but the way that an object can be mutable and in Object Oriented Programming the difference between Identity and State are currently hard to understand, and how Clojure manage this with the Data Structures.

One of the most interesting points for me is that the support for the values and the way that functional programming with the data structures and the concurrency against the use of the libraries with something like Java. In this way is one of the most curious points for studying Clojure.

Finally, this interview had my special attention because of the way that Rich Hickey expose Clojure with solid and well explain arguments that has also this technical strength, and even when is not my first language option, it could make me think of it as an option for my professional development.