Re: [tlug] recomendations for a functional language

[Alan Busby <thebusby@example.com>]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com> wrote:

Note, however, that Clojure, being a Common Lisp variant, is not really so functional as even Scheme, not to mention missing very interesting features such as pattern matching and a Hindley-Milner system. 

Although it uses duck typing, and not Hindley-Milney, I can't imagine Clojure not being considered "functional" simply due to all the things it took from Haskell such as it's use of immutable data structures, STM, and lack of state. I find Clojure a happy middle ground between Haskell, Java, and Lisp; taking the best of each.

If you're dismissing Clojure as another Common Lisp variant, I suspect you're missing the significant difference between the two, and should do a little more reading into what Clojure is before discussing it.

> The value of running on the JVM really can't be understated, since it offers
> access to production quality libraries for just about everything.

I strongly disagree with that statement, though this usually provokes a flamewar.

Irregardless of quality, or old/bad design in many cases, it's very useful not to have to write an entire library by hand simply to deal with paypal, amazon, or any number of other systems. 

Not to mention the additional ease of deployment, like running code on Hadoop clusters on Amazon EC2.

It all depends on what your use cases are really, and for every positive you'll find with one tool, you'll find quite a few negatives as well. You can't dismiss one tool, simply because it may not be the best for one job. This is true for programming languages, algorithms, people, etc.