Four years ago I wrote about my first (and last) experience with Common Lisp. I had high expectations and was disappointed; I ended up thinking maybe I should give Scheme or Clojure a try. It took a while, but I finally did it last month: learn Clojure. And it looks like a keeper.

Clojure has all the goodness of Lisp and functional programming, and it feels like a modern language: it addresses most of things that annoyed me about Common Lisp.

I’ve followed the great Clojure for the brave and true book by Daniel Higginbotham and then I’ve tackled a small project to train my skills. Here are my notes.

The good

A consistent syntax, operation names and polymorphic functions. No weird illegible names, no type specific versions of the same function (I’m looking at you Common Lisp).

Functional! Immutable! Expressive! I don’t miss objects. Structuring programs in small functions; isolated, never changing data; those things just feel right. And I’m not even waving the old “shared state is bad for concurrency” flag; I don’t care —just now— about concurrency. This stuff makes programs simpler to reason about and test, and more fun to write. There’s more: Clojure is so expressive and gives you enough options (I’m thinking loop, doseq, destructuring, etc.) that you don’t necessarily need to incur in “head/tail” recursive processing as much as I found in other functional languages, so the leap is not so rough.

Did I say I don’t care about concurrency? I don’t. Mostly. Not at the language level, anyway. Clojure has a lot of cool tools for concurrency (future, delay, promise, pmap, core.async). Too much options, maybe, but I don’t mind about that either. I can just RTFM whenever I do have the need to do things concurrently. And, yes, immutability and pure functions make it simpler.

A strong philosophy behind the language, that seems to drive its design. Python has this too and to me it’s its biggest selling point. Languages like C++ and increasingly JavaScript, on the other hand, feel like magic bags where features are added carelessly without consideration of the results. Java does have a strong philosophy: programmers are mostly idiots.

Runs on the JVM. Seriously? I personally couldn’t care less about that but JVM languages seem to attract a lot of attention. There are tons of Java devs for sure and some of them seem to have a symbiotic relationship with the JVM: it’s like they aren’t cheating on Java if they keep the deal inside the VM. Why would people learn Groovy instead of Ruby or Python, god only knows, but because of the “Runs in Java” part there’s a better chance of finding a Clojure Job than one using Haskell, Scheme or most other functional languages around. That alone is enough reason for me to stick with Clojure instead of keep trying Lisp dialects, even if some other one may fit my taste better.

Haven’t tried it yet, but the mere existence of ClojureScript is good news to me, specially considering how annoyed I am with the direction the JavaScript syntax and ecosystem is taking lately. This talk totally sold it to me.

Said it before and say it again: forget about parenthesis. People seem to worry a lot about them beforehand, but as with Python whitespace indentation, once you’ve used it for five minutes it just goes away. Specially if you use the darn awesome Parinfer.

Which brings me to: you don’t need Emacs for Lisp programming. Yes, I hear you, once I master Emacs I’ll be a more powerful programmer. But I’m trying to learn a weird language here, don’t make me also learn a weird, counter-intuitive editor at the same time. That would just increase the chances of me dropping the effort altogether. There are decent ports of Paredit for Sublime and Atom, which is good enough. But with Parinfer you just learn one command and forget about it, it just works.

There are decent ports of Paredit for Sublime and Atom, which is good enough. But with Parinfer you just learn one command and forget about it, it just works. REPL driven development. Because of pure functions it’s easy to write a piece of code and test it right away in the REPL. Together with unit tests it pretty much removes the need for debugging.

Leiningen looks good, it covers the small needs I had starting out and didn’t get in the way. Clojurians say it does a lot more than that, so great. Much better than the 17 tools you need to set up to have a Node.js project running these days.

The bad

Namespace syntax is complicated, there are too many operations and keywords to do it (require, refer, use, alias, import and ns —which can do all of the others with a slightly different notation). It’s flexible but boilerplatish, even when sticking to ns:

(ns advenjure.game (:require [advenjure.rooms :as rooms] [advenjure.utils :as utils] [advenjure.verb-map :refer [find-verb verb-map]]))

And while there’s no hard rule to keep a one to one relation between files and namespaces, there’s a strong convention to do it, so having to declare the package name in every file seems totally redundant (and Java-ish, let’s be honest).

contains? Works in a counter-intuitive way for vectors.

That’s all I got.

And the ugly

Ok, there wasn’t much bad stuff, but there is some maybe not so good or arguably not good things I can think of.

The built in operator set doesn’t follow the Unix and Python philosophy of small core and a lot of libraries that I like so much: the functions are way too many to easily remember, and they aren’t entirely orthogonal (some of them do the same thing in slightly different ways). Then again, the Clojure Cheatsheet , the REPL and doc are more than enough to cope with that.

Polymorphism is great: sequence and collection functions work as expected in all data structures. The downside is that to do so the results are always coerced to seqs, which may be unexpected, specially for hash maps. In practice, though, I found myself just chaining those functions and rarely caring about the resulting type.

Macros are powerful and awesome but the quoting syntax can get very tricky. I definitely need more experience to learn to reason about macro code, but the syntax will remain ugly. I guess that’s the cost you pay for being able to fiddle with how the language processes the code. In the end (much like Python metaclasses), macros are a great tool to keep in the box, but to use sparingly. So far every time I thought about implementing one I got away fine by using closures instead.

Java does sneak in quite a bit and that’s a turn off. (spoiler alert: I don’t like Java). OK, Java interop is simple and powerful, probably the most straightforward language interfacing I’ve seen (boy was SWIG a nightmare). That being said, Java code inside Clojure looks like, well, Java code inside Clojure: it reeks. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if needed only to interact with some third party Java libraries, but in practice I’ve found that there’s basic stuff lacking in the Clojure standard library and it’s either add a dependency or use Java interop. I saw this while solving an exercise from the Brave Clojure book: it asked to list the first results of a google search. The request should be a one liner using the built in slurp function but, wait, you need to set the User-Agent header to request google, so you end up with:

(with-open [inputstream (-> (java.net.URL. url) .openConnection (doto (.setRequestProperty "User-Agent" "Mozilla/5.0 ...")) .getContent)]

The end

Even though it’s not my ideal language and it may be less ideal to me than Python was, it looks like I’ll start to look for excuses to use Clojure as much as possible and it’ll be a while before I jump to study another new language.