The Programming Languages Blog

Rich Hickey on Clojure. Rich Hickey is the creator of the Clojure language, before this, he developed dotLISP based on the .NET platform. In this podcast, Rich Hickey discusses the characteristics and fundamentals of the Clojure language. Both Lisp and Clojure are functional programming languages, one of the main differences between these two is that Clojure can also be a really good object-oriented language, and this is mainly because of the way Clojure has been developed and designed, Clojure runs on the Java Virtual Machine, which makes it easier to run on multiple platforms, particularly in this podcast, Hickey explains the details about Clojure´s implementation and the way it manages mutable data, and also, about making resource-efficient data structures and make them run on the JVM. Clojure is based on LISP, which translates in Clojure inheriting all the good practices of LISP, as well as it’s functional advantages, and, implementing new ones, such as the...

The first thing that comes to my mind after listening to a 60 minute podcast about LISP is how underrated and underused it is, I am really enjoying the simple way of programming from Clojure, but it is really important to learn the foundations where Clojure was founded, LISP is a purely functional language, which means everything is a function, and consequentially, everything returns something, although, this can be really useful, the main attractiveness for me about functional programming is that it doesn’t have side effects, meaning LISP is a really secure program, which means it can be trusted, sharing the responsibility of security along with the programmer. An actual really interesting thing about LISP is the performance it has, one of the characteristics about this is prefix notation, which makes the operations easier to write (not necessarily meaning more readable) and easy to perform, also, one thing LISP can presume with other programming languages, is it...

The promises of functional programming. With each problem comes a wide option of solutions, in some cases choosing the correct one is particularly easy, but when the solutions are not binary, choosing an actual adequate approach to the problem becomes hard. Something similar has been occurring for a long period of time with computational programming, the requirements of a software are becoming tougher as each year passes, and the options of the programmers to solve the issue are less, in recent years the ‘winner’ at this issues was Object Oriented Programming, it almost seemed as if OOP was the only viable option to create software, but as everything becomes more demanding, the actual way of making everything an object and leaving the whole responsibility and magnitude of the software to the developer seems to be not the best solution at all. Nowadays there is another paradigm that seems to become stronger, not only because how powerful it can be, but also the...