

Historical note (Jan. 7, 2014) - This ancient post still gets several hundred to a thousand page views per month! And, unsurprisingly, the Clojure community still replies to the criticisms therein with... only insults. This is what comes of a product fundamentally brain-damaged at birth.



I find

Clojure is the False Lisp, which Reeketh of the Cube Farm.

I don't care if everybody really is more productive in Clojure than in Common Lisp. The latter is not my standard of comparison (Symbolics Genera, the state of the art, is. Or, if you want something that is distinctly inferior but is currently available on the market: Mathematica.) Clojure is the gutted and zombie-reanimated corpse of a dream.

The cult of Good Enough which seems to pervade all of modern computing has finally chewed its way through to the Lisp community, with Clojure as the result. I am tired of this abomination being hailed as the future of Lisp. Aficionados of real Lisps, such as myself, will keep hoping, dreaming, and working on systems which do not betray the original virtues of the language.

Edit: Update