<b>When it was Clojure vs. Java and what is Clojure killer app</b><br><br>It ...

Terrence Miao - 2014-07-31 11:43:24+1000 - Updated: 2014-08-01 06:22:20+1000

When it was Clojure vs. Java and what is Clojure killer app

It seems that Clojure is good for data, big data. Not surprise that Google backs it.

Someone reckons one thing of a great power of programming language should be “Data is Code and Code is Data”.

Clojure code is data. Clojure code is representedin Clojure data. Clojure data is represented in Clojure data structures. Clojure meta data is represented in Clojure data structures as well.

On a different perspective, Java code is string. Java data is represented in Java Arrays and Java Collections. Java meta data is represented with annotations.

Already seen a much bigger aspiration?

… …

Ruby has Rails. You can create a blog app in 15 minutes. Java has tons of frameworks, you can develop an online pet shop in a day. What does Clojure have? What killer app Clojure in disguise could make Clojure become mainstream, cover from web to big data, not just a wrapper?

Someone says the next big thing alongside with web is mobile. Clojure apps run as smooth as Java apps. There will be e.g. Clojure for Android in future. Other says although there isn’t amazing library or framework Clojure could offer for some problem domain, like micro services – accessing databases (SQL and NoSQL), interacting with third party with web services, JSON, XML, REST could become Clojure's winning ground.

Steve Yegge who created Rhino for Rails once made a call that “JVM is the killer application of Clojure”.

Maybe he is right … …

Dean Budd - 2014-07-31 20:44:52+1000 - Updated: 2014-07-31 20:47:07+1000

Yes. Interesting times. I'll make a minor correction. There are many libraries available for Clojure to handle all that boiler plate stuff i.e ReST, databases, etc
I don't think Clojure really needs a killer app. The thing that sold me on it (aside from the huge benefits of FP in our new multi-core universe) is it's simplicity.

I really think that's what we need right now. We put a lot of effort into (trying to) make our systems simple, which are trying to solve more complex problems every decade, but simple is hard. So let's keep our languages simple too.

Dean Budd - 2014-07-31 20:52:40+1000

The Code is Data is a perfect example of that. With simplicity comes great power.

Casper Casper - 2014-08-07 09:04:27+1000

The emphasis (and restrictions?) on immutable data make things massively simpler. It's worth trying to remove uses of mutable data in any language :) so much easier to understand and test.