The Koolaid of Clojure

Been looking at Clojure for a little while without actually learning it. Now that I've finished a course taught by Martin Ordesky on Functional Programming in Scala, I think I'm ready to tackle (and compare) Clojure.

I've already had gallons of the Lisp Koolaid back in college, and for most of my career, thought its concepts (and even its syntax) to be better than the languages I used for during my day job.

Infix vs. Prefix

I chuckle how many programmers dismiss Lisp, Scheme and by association, Clojure, because of code like this:

(+ 1 5 3 7)

Everyone knows it is supposed to be:

1 + 5 + 3 + 7

Infix is nice when writing equations on paper, since you need some sort of separator between the digits, but most programmers use prefix notation more than infix. My equation doesn't look odd if I rewrote it like:

(sum 1 5 3 7)

Note the equivalent code in a C-ancestral language would be:

sum(1, 5, 3, 7)

But the advantage of a Lisp language means that you don't worry about operator precedence. I know what you're thinking. Of course, Lisp doesn't care about precedence since it uses parens around everything.

Guilty as charged, however, the complexity of operator sorting in Scala could make baby kittens cry. Colons at the end of a function name, er… operator associates to the right? All that just to save a few keystrokes, huh?

My point is not to convince to like Lisp-style syntax, but just to admit that it is ok and not that strange.

Shall we move on and talk about imperative and functional programming?

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