Rich Hickey on Clojure

This week was the turn of  Episode 158: Rich Hickey on Clojure of the software engineering radio, that invited the creator of Clojure programming language, Rich Hickey, that give an explanation of the functionality of Clojure and other technical stuff about it.

One of the most interesting question that was asked, is ¿Why is LIST not a mainstream language? And the answer was that List was not design to be a mainstream language, but to be used by SUPER USERS, like scientist, people that are trying to solve really hard problems, and the point was to give them the power to do so. List became really popular but lost it when AI boom disappeared. 

Other thing that he mention that was fascinating was that programming is a social thing, most of the time when people outside the software engineering path think about the stereotype of the programmers they believed that we are antisocial and love the dark in our room, but the truth is that the field strongly encourage you to work side by side with other colleagues, so that idea need to be gone. 

We continue now with Clojure, why behind this language was to make a lisp with all the cool stuff and to fix the island problem, that means you can't use any code made by other people. So that's why syntactic expand ability is important and why is a measure of the power of a language.  Also, now the target were any programmer with open mind and search for fun and looking for a simple syntaxis (This last point is really tight to one's perception of simple).

Clojure is really all about immutable data structures, built in libraries are constructed in terms of abstractions and pure functions. Not having mutable data structures prevent the side effect of the functions and help maintain performance.  One way of seeing data structures is thinking about linked list that when you change something you add a node, and you're slowly moving from a list to a tree.

Clojure is simple, that's the premise.