Rich Hickey on Clojure

This weeks podcast was an interview to Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure, to tell the audience a little bit more about his programming language, how it works and what are the main differences between it and Lisp, the language it is based on.

Clojure is based on Lisp, which means that Clojure also processes list by the extensive uses of parentheses, but Clojure is different in the sense that it runs on the JVM, so it has the Java garbage collection, and also means Clojure can implement Java libraries creating a bridge between the “Islands of code”, meaning the use of code that is written for another language.

The data structures on Lisp are mutable, but Rich made them not mutable on Clojure, so that's one of the biggest advantage of Clojure over Lisp. This came from the idea that the developer should be able to track down any variable, and that variable should have the exact same value if the developers didn’t change it on a function.

As we discuss earlier, Clojure has the ability to run Java libraries, creating a Java object that Clojure can use in the code to run with it’s own functions. This is why Clojure is the most known Lisp dialect. This ability gives us the best of both worlds, like having small functions with the full functionality of Java.

Clojure is a compiled language, depending on the ide, functions can be compiled individually, so when you compile the entire code, most of it is already compiled because of testing.
I think that clojure has the potential to be widely used, because once you get the hang of it, a developer can be very pro efficient using it, and it has a lot of the functionality that Java has, but programming can be done in a couple lines.

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