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out of curiosity, why did you go the clojure route instead of the scala route? From what i understand, scala has more libraries available, including ai and nlp

out of curiosity, why did you go the clojure route instead of the scala route? From what i understand, scala has more libraries available, including ai and nlp libraries but maybe my impression is not correct?

aboytsov 14y ago
It's hard to compare Clojure and Scala. Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language with strong OOP support and functional support. It's arguably more verbose than Clojure but looks much more similar to Java. Clojure is a Lisp. Lisp stands aside all other programming languages, first of all, because it supports syntactic abstraction (a.k.a. "code is data"). Hardcode addicts (I'm not one of them) say there are only two programming languages - Lisp and non-Lisp. Here's a good comparison of Scala and Clojure: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1314732/scala-vs-groovy-vs-clojure http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1314732/scala-vs-groovy-v... When we made the decision to switch to Clojure, several things affected it, in no particular order: - we had some people who were already very proficient in Lisp - we liked how expressive and compact it was - Lisp is considered to possess immense expressive power (see http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html) - we were enamoured by Cascalog (http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-cascalog-a-clojure-based-query-language-for-hado.html http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-cascalog-a-clojure-ba...), and it's written in and for Clojure. This one payed off very well. - Lisp has a reputation of being great at manipulating data: lists, graphs, etc. Here's a good answer from one of our engineers: http://www.quora.com/Clojure/Why-would-someone-learn-Clojure http://www.quora.com/Clojure/Why-would-someone-learn-Clojure As for libraries, both Clojure and Scala are JVM-based, and Clojure has a very good syntax for Java interop, so all Java libraries are available to us. But, of course, Clojure community also spits out libraries like crazy, for example, take a look at this marvel which we use in Drake for parsing: https://github.com/joshua-choi/fnparse https://github.com/joshua-choi/fnparse.
- dirtyvagabond 14y ago
  another way to look at this is: we didn't say to ourselves, "we have to be on the JVM, so which JVM language should we use"? instead we asked, "what would be a great language for this project?" and arrived at Clojure based on the above.
- pencilcode 14y ago
  Thanks for your feedback. I've been playing around with both languages, and was leaning towards scala since it seemed more likely i could use it professionally, even though i liked clojure a bit more, sortta like the lisp like syntax.

aboytsov 14y ago

It's hard to compare Clojure and Scala. Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language with strong OOP support and functional support. It's arguably more verbose than Clojure but looks much more similar to Java. Clojure is a Lisp. Lisp stands aside all other programming languages, first of all, because it supports syntactic abstraction (a.k.a. "code is data"). Hardcode addicts (I'm not one of them) say there are only two programming languages - Lisp and non-Lisp. Here's a good comparison of Scala and Clojure: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1314732/scala-vs-groovy-vs-clojure http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1314732/scala-vs-groovy-v... When we made the decision to switch to Clojure, several things affected it, in no particular order: - we had some people who were already very proficient in Lisp - we liked how expressive and compact it was - Lisp is considered to possess immense expressive power (see http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html) - we were enamoured by Cascalog (http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-cascalog-a-clojure-based-query-language-for-hado.html http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-cascalog-a-clojure-ba...), and it's written in and for Clojure. This one payed off very well. - Lisp has a reputation of being great at manipulating data: lists, graphs, etc. Here's a good answer from one of our engineers: http://www.quora.com/Clojure/Why-would-someone-learn-Clojure http://www.quora.com/Clojure/Why-would-someone-learn-Clojure As for libraries, both Clojure and Scala are JVM-based, and Clojure has a very good syntax for Java interop, so all Java libraries are available to us. But, of course, Clojure community also spits out libraries like crazy, for example, take a look at this marvel which we use in Drake for parsing: https://github.com/joshua-choi/fnparse https://github.com/joshua-choi/fnparse.

dirtyvagabond 14y ago
another way to look at this is: we didn't say to ourselves, "we have to be on the JVM, so which JVM language should we use"? instead we asked, "what would be a great language for this project?" and arrived at Clojure based on the above.
pencilcode 14y ago
Thanks for your feedback. I've been playing around with both languages, and was leaning towards scala since it seemed more likely i could use it professionally, even though i liked clojure a bit more, sortta like the lisp like syntax.