Rich Hickey on Clojure

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In the podcast titled "Rich Hickey on Clojure" by Software Engineering Radio, the guest, Rich Hickey, talks about the characteristics and capabilities of Clojure. An important approach is given to mention the differences between Lisp and Clojure, and the motivations for creating Clojure. Why Rich Hickey does a very good job talking about Clojure? Well, he is the creator.

 What makes Clojure unique? We already know that it is a functional language that runs on top of the JVM, but its most special feature according to its creator is  the fact that programs are presented to the compiler as data structures, no text. In common Lisp those data structures are lists only, but in Clojure can be vectors and maps. This characteristic of Clojure makes programming and metaprogramming the same thing.

A very interesting question is asked to Hickey: Why Lisp is not a mainstream programming language?  His response was that Lisp was not designed to be a mainstream programming language, It was designed for super users, researchers, smart people who have to solve complicated problems.
Lisp never became widely used because it was not well connected to the rest of the world, Lisp can not be connected to other languages, so, the reason he wrote Clojure was because he wanted a language with all the power of Lisp but without the 'isolation problem'.

The guest explains some of the more important characteristics of Clojure: syntax simplicity, immutable data structures (in Lisp are mutable), the library (API design) that is built in terms of abstractions, persistent data, concurrency.
Some of these concepts seemed quite complex and I honestly did not fully understand what Hickey was talking about, although Hickey mentioned that it was actually quite simple! I suppose that putting these concepts into practice would make everything clearer.

This podcast was very interesting and it made me learn more about Clojure, Clojure is for open-minded people, who want to do different things and take risks.

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