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PBX I'm Paul Bissex. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Then I taught photographers how to create good websites. I co-wrote a book along the way. Now I am helping turn a giant media corporation into a digital enterprise. Feel free to email me.

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Clojure is cool

Tonight we had a special edition of the Western Mass. Developers' Group as Rich Hickey made the long trek north to talk to us about Clojure, his functional Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM.

I enjoyed Rich's presentation a lot. He's clearly a very smart guy with very focused goals for the language. He breezed through the basic Clojure intro stuff to get to slides and a demo app focused specifically on concurrency issues. He walked us through almost every piece of the example app, a simple graphical simulation a couple hundred lines long. Remarkably, given that I have almost no non-toy experience with Lisp or Java, I found it mostly understandable.

He's definitely on a tear against gratuitous mutability in software. Those are my words, not his; what he said was: "Mutability is the new spaghetti code." (If this seems perplexing, reading up on functional programming may help. I know I had no idea why people were railing against mutability and state before I started playing with Haskell.)

Some miscellaneous things that I found interesting or cool:

The REPL. Honestly, after so much time with Python, I consider this an essential feature.
A lot of Clojure is written in Clojure. See the boot.clj source file.
Maps (hash tables) act as functions of their keys. Nice uniformity; why have a separate syntax for these? Also allows you to replace your map with a more complex function later without messing with the interface.
"Persistent data structures" allow you to have both immutability and performance. If you create an updated version B of a data structure A, B is not a full copy; it's more like a diff. There's a lot of stuff under the hood here that I am not yet smart enough to understand.
Clojure code can be edited to change a running application on the fly.
Earlier implementations generated Java and C# source code; now it compiles directly to JVM bytecode. It seems that code generation almost always ends up being a prototype solution, not a final solution.

Rich is an effective language advocate not just because he's smart and articulate, but because he's clearly done his research and understands the relevant alternatives and tradeoffs in a deep way. When asked about Erlang, he took pains to point out the things that Erlang does well, and the differences between Clojure and Erlang that are the result of different conscious tradeoffs. Engineering is about tradeoffs.

Thanks to Lou and Chas for organizing and hosting this, and of course to Rich for making the drive and the time to evangelize Clojure to a small group of programmers in the (relative) sticks.

Update: See Lou's blog post for a more detailed recap of the talk.

Another Update: Rich has posted the slides, audio, and code from his talk.

Thursday, March 20th, 2008
clojure + fp + programming + wmassdevs

Some related posts: Clojure talk in Northampton MA • Understanding tuples vs. lists in Python • Developer meeting braindump 2007-09-20 • Developer meeting braindump 2007-08-09 • OSCON 2007, Day 3 • Developer meeting braindump 2007-07-12 • Developer meeting braindump • Real-World Haskell: A new book • Learning Haskell inch by inch • It's Haskell

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