clojure
Table of Contents
- The Joy Of Clojure
- So Many Parenthesis! (Chris Nuremberger's quick intro to Clojure)
- No Iterations
- Lisp
Clojure
A Lisp, which is the only language that is also beautiful. Hosted on the JVM for reach. Functional, expressive, opinionated. It's paradigm is now called 'data oriented' [Sharvit 2022].
Data orientedness
Not to be confused with the approach of the same name in game development, that one is about data layout.
Data orientedness uses general data constructs and functions, i.e. something line json data and pure functions, to represent an information processing domain.
For instance, to model a library, we do not model books and librarians, we model the inventory book a librarian would use.
We do not model a students and courses, but a student-course book.
Good data orientedness should the traditions of accounting etc. seriously. Putting computerized information processing in the tradition of accounting and bookeeping.
For instance, recorded facts are facts, and cannot be updated afterwards (Only a new fact, a correction, ca be recorded).
Modeling the students and courses is good for a simulation, if the program actually should represent something like student behaviour. This is perhaps good in something like a game, but not in something like a library information system.
Simula was made for simulation, and is the mother of all OOP (Object Oriented Programming).
Clojure is weird:
- It is a Lisp, which is a cleaning up of computer science and called the Maxwell equations of programming for a reason. It is a programming paradigm that exists because it is closer to the truth of what programming is about. I.e. to improve on Lisps paradigm, you have to make actual discoveries in the fundamentals of programming. And doing so would not tell us that there is something better than Lisp, but it would tell us more about the true nature of Lisp.
- It has pragmatism as part of it's design philosophy
- And it has a tradition of craftsmanship that incorporates doing design, i.e. not doing design work is bad Clojure programming.
Clojure 2 is an incoherent concept
Coherent concepts: Rust 2, or Go 2, or python 4.
You take feedback, you design and implement, you 'make it better', you call it Lang V n+1 and ship it.
For Clojure, this would be weird. Because pragmatism is a core value of the language.
- Clojure is built to last, making breaking changes is a no-go, the tradeoffs would have to be huge.
- Making a new language would take time and resources, which are weighed against the tradeoffs.
- Pragmatism means that doing nothing is on the table, similar to the null-hypothesis in science. You have to ask 'is doing the thing better than not doing anything?'.
So it is not literally the case that there is a law of nature that prevents Clojure 2 from existing, there is something like the next best thing.
There is something like a (rational) memetic-behaverioural decision structure.
Given the right kind of knowledge d, namely Clojure design philosophy, a (rational) person will not
engage in behaviour X, in the range of foreseable situations E (where E is a set of situations, an enviroment).
A possible situation outside of E is that the person simply has fun making Clojure 2.
But for normative pragmatic Clojure programmers, a lot of fun is being had by using Clojure creatively to solve other problems.
It is like the pragmatic design philosophy (meme) brings the behaviour of Clojure programmers closer to reality through design work, a form of error correction.
Resources and tradeoffs are real, if error correction is bringing is closer to reality we converge to the same reality. Otherwise it is bad error correction or bad design work.
Great thinkers think alike, because they error correct. And good Clojure programmers behave alike. Clojure's pragmatism, is analogous to rationality, they are cultures of error correction, cultures of conjecture and criticism.
Using Clojure for the sake of using Clojure would be bad Clojure programming.
The tradeoffs might lie with using another language for getting a job done.
Coercive Programming Constructs
Static types
Does an author of an novel say "All sentences should be between 5 and 15 words long."?
Programming is to a novel what the story is to a novel. Source code is to programming what the text is to a novel.
Puzzle oriented programming has its place perhaps in education. But has to play in a minor role in actually solving real world problems.
Concretions
- Using code constructs where plain data would do the job. This is a concretion, not an abstraction [Hickey].
- Using the powerful tool of creating mini languages to express business logic.