Rich Hickey on Clojure

On this podcast we can hear to Rich Hickey, who is the designer/ writer of Clojure. The master mind behind Clojure. On this podcast he talks about Clojure and some other aspects of Lisp Language as well, he refers to it as a motivation that led him design a new version of the Lisp language. He explains us how Lisp was considered the basis for Clojure.

At the beginning he gives us a brief introduction of both languages. He makes an affirmation that says that Clojure is a dynamic programming language for the gradient boosting machine, but it also runs in a common language runtime.

 Clojure runs scripts so it is considered a functional language, it runs on JVM. This is the reason why this programming language can run almost everywhere. The implementation of its data structures helps to make programming much easier than Lisp. On the other hand, Lisp programs are presented to the compiler in the form of data structures as the compiler doesn´t compile text.

Rich Hickey says that Lisp has never become mainstream as Java or C++ because this language was not designed to be a mainstream language, it was targeted toward superusers like researchers and smart people with difficult problems. As a main reason, he wrote Clojure because he wanted a language with all the power of Lisp but without the isolation problem.

The main differences and common aspects mentioned in the podcast about these two programming languages are that in Lisp data structures are mutable, they can change. In Clojure data is immutable. In Lisp, all the libraries work for the specific data structures, while in Clojure there is an abstraction of those functions to make this functions work for every data that presents any kind of sequential structure.

This podcast was very interesting to compare this programming languages and its scope and limitations .