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Thumbs Down for Clojure

Published on: Thursday June 25 2009

Historical note (Jan. 7, 2014) - This ancient post still gets several hundred to a thousand page views per month! And, unsurprisingly, the Clojure community still replies to the criticisms therein with... only insults. This is what comes of a product fundamentally brain-damaged at birth.

I find Clojure revolting.

It is the most explicit to date abandonment of the age-old Lispers' Dream, "Lisp All The Way Down." Clojure is the antithesis of the Lisp Machine. Instead of a crystalline pyramid of comprehensible mutually-interlocking concepts, behind every Clojure primitive there lurks Black Magic. The Clojure user who is missing some routine or other will run crying to Java for help, rather than implementing the feature himself correctly - that is, as a natural part of the entire language, built on the same concepts. Clojure pisses on everything I've ever loved about Lisp. It rejects even what little consistency and intellectual rigor there is to be found in an abomination like Common Lisp.

Clojure is the False Lisp, which Reeketh of the Cube Farm. A Lisp unworthy of the name; one which encourages users to pepper their code with calls to opaque routines having no underlying Lispiness. A Lisp which barfs Java stack traces. It promotes - no, mandates - the use of undigestable foreign matter in Lisp code: primitives on which you cannot pop the hood to reveal intelligible innards.

I don't care if everybody really is more productive in Clojure than in Common Lisp. The latter is not my standard of comparison (Symbolics Genera, the state of the art, is. Or, if you want something that is distinctly inferior but is currently available on the market: Mathematica.) Clojure is the gutted and zombie-reanimated corpse of a dream.

The cult of Good Enough which seems to pervade all of modern computing has finally chewed its way through to the Lisp community, with Clojure as the result. I am tired of this abomination being hailed as the future of Lisp. Aficionados of real Lisps, such as myself, will keep hoping, dreaming, and working on systems which do not betray the original virtues of the language.

Symbolics Genera remains the gold standard of programming systems. Though largely forgotten, it can never be un-created. My standard of comparison for any technology will always be everything previously achieved by mankind, rather than what is available on the market today.

Edit: Update.

This entry was written by Stanislav , posted on Thursday June 25 2009 , filed under Distractions, Hot Air, Lisp, NonLoper, SoftwareSucks

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131 Responses to "Thumbs Down for Clojure"

Clojure : The zombie-reanimated corpse of Lisp | imagine27 says:

June 7, 2012 at 3:38 pm

[...] Clojure introduces new problems(ok ‘challenges’ if you will) having discarded enough of the last half-century of Lisp progress. Sure, Common Lisp has it’s problems but hailing Clojure as it’s future is a new low in the community. Another lisper put it so bluntly :  "Clojure is the gutted and zombie-reanimated corpse of a dream." [...]

Reply

Kevin says:

June 10, 2012 at 11:10 pm

Posts like these are the reason I was never interested in being a part of the CL community. If you want this dream to come true, start playing the fucking game.

Reply

Stanislav says:

June 10, 2012 at 11:30 pm

Dear Kevin,

And which game would that be? The one where people compete to see who can write a more pathetic cheap imitation of Common Lisp?

Yours,

-Stanislav

Reply

Daniel says:

July 6, 2012 at 12:22 am

No, it's the one where you make Common Lisp libraries that solve real problems.

Common Lisp is amazing. I too wish it were better, but most of its libraries are undocumented, half-implemented hacks that take more effort to use than the imperative counterparts that they are mimicking.

I can't build usable software in CL in anywhere near as short a time as I can with Java, let alone Clojure, and that may speak little for my programming skills, but we can't keep point at twenty years ago saying, "Look, Lisp is better" when it hasn't actually done anything within the last five.

Reply

Stanislav says:

July 6, 2012 at 7:44 am

Dear Daniel,

> most of its libraries are undocumented, half-implemented hacks...

This has not been my experience. Not in the last five years, anyway.

> I can’t build usable software in CL in anywhere near as short a time as I can with Java

Common Lisp is a Stradivari violin, not a kazoo. It simply isn't for you - you have just admitted as much. Go learn a different respectable trade, where you might be able to fully appreciate high-quality professional tools.

> [Lisp] hasn’t actually done anything within the last five.

You know, your problems might stem from...