Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.

Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine.

Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

What do you get for all of these tradeoffs? Speed, memory safety. But with that you still still have dynamic invocation capabilities (making things like interception possible) and hotswap/live redefinition (things that C/CPP cannot do).

Perfect? No, but very practical for the real world use case.

Throw in Clojure into the mix, and you get superpowers!

I'm still trying to mentally grok the Clojure model and syntax hah. On my todo list. Clojure users seem to love it though. Do you have a tutorial that could sell it to me?

For syntax, maybe this general Lisp advice will help: consider a normal function call, like f(a, b). To make this into a Lisp function call, drop the unnecessary comma (whitespace is enough to separate tokens) like f(a b), and then move the function name inside the parentheses, like (f a b). Applying operators that are considered "primitive" in other languages are syntactically treated the same as functions. So imagine an add function like add(a, b), but instead of being named 'add', it's just named '+', like +(a, b). Applying the same transformation as before, this turns into (+ a b).

Using the function application syntax for primitives like + is nice because you get the same flexibility of normal functions, like variable argument length: (+ a b c).

Clojure is a little bit less uniform than other Lispy languages in that it has special brackets for lists (square brackets) and for maps (curly brackets), but that's pretty much it.

it also has the threading operator or macro.

i am not a clojure or lisp expert, just saying.