Interesting comment about Google Go

[chris at seberino.org]

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 04:27:01PM -0800, Tracy Reed wrote:
> I have been planning on learning some sort of Scheme
> to get my Lisp experience.

There really isn't much to learn.  If you can edit your .emacs file you are
pretty far along.

You may get your enlightenment by implementing a primtive Lisp yourself.
Read McCarthy's original papers and you'll get a lot from that.  What is
amazing is how simple it is.

I implemented a baby Lisp you can see here: http://seberino.org .
I didn't implement macros and associative arrays and other baggage so I don't
know if I got all the enlightenment you are looking for.  My goal was to see
how far I could get with the most minimal of grammars and primitive operators.
I think that is the essence of Lisp.  Others may disagree.

> Is Clojure really "a Lisp"? Does Lisp really
> map well to the JVM?

Irrelevant unless you plan to do real work with it which is doubtful.
Stick to Python and Haskell for a few years before you can answer your question
me thinks.

> I have been thinking lately that since Java has
> become so popular (much to my chagrine and disappointment) that maybe
> I should become more familiar with it. Especially since Hadoop,
> Cassandra, Lucene, etc. are implemented in Java.

True.  I'm not sure why Jython isn't more popular.  The JVM seems to be good
technology.

> Would learning
> Clojure then be a good idea? Would I still have a chance to experience
> the great enlightenment that so many of the people who have learned
> Lisp like to talk about while also being able to get a leg up on Java?

That's pushing it.  They are very different languages.

If you know OOP, Java isn't that hard either to learn either.
It is a fairly well designed language.  My only beef is how it gets to verbose.
Guido says one line in Python or Ruby is often equal to 10 lines of Java.  I
think I see his point.

cs