Comments on "Rich Hickey on Clojure"

Not very often we hear from the actual creator of a programming language, in this case we heard from Rich Hickley, the creator of the Clojure programming language.

In this podcast, Rich talks about the most important differences and advantages between Clojure and all the other LISP based programming languages, and what makes Clojure a unique solution thanks to its uncommon features, that make Clojure a great programming language, when trying to solve a particular problem.

One of the main characteristics that Rich mentions about Clojure, is that is a programming language, based on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that works in a dynamic way and has the JVM working as an intermediate between the program attributes, and its functions. This works great when we want to develop and optimize for parallel programming, it uses literals as lists and vector, which not many LISP programming language implement.

Clojure can be a great option when trying to solve a given problem, but it is not necessary the best option in every case, sometimes using other languages like Java, may be easier for the programmer to give a solution to a problem. Clojure is a declarative programming language, which can be a great source of learning if we are not familiar or we don’t have much practice using declarative programming languages.

Clojure allows the use of libraries which allow the developer to work in a more efficient way when using data structures, theses libraries are a set of collection, that allow the programmer to implement in an easier way certain functions that eventually will lead to a better quality and performance of the software delivered. Another great characteristic of Clojure, is that the data structures are immutable, which guaranties a better performance, since values must not be locked and this makes it useful when wanting to program in a parallel way.

Clojure is one of the best programming languages, when trying to learn to code, it will open the panorama and will enforce our programming experience.