My bud Matt Raible blogged about reading a Scala book and I mentioned Stuart Holloway's "Programming Clojure". Matt replied "I like Scala and Groovy and see no compelling reason to learn Clojure. Am I missing something?"

Good question. Eric Lavigne said a few things about Clojure that caught my attention:

"My knowledge of Groovy and Scala are very limited, but here are my impressions relative to Clojure.

Scala seems like a good programming language. Its static typing reduces its flexibility compared to Clojure, but may still be a good deal because it helps with catching errors more quickly. Scala also has been around longer than Clojure, and has used that time to develop more sophisticated libraries than are available for Clojure right now. So why is Clojure still worth learning? Scala gets much of its flexibility from having a lot of features built into the language. Clojure has a small number of language features that are carefully chosen to work well together. The result is a language that is both very flexible and very easy to learn.

One of the design goals of Groovy was to be compatible with Java code, but providing some extra features, just as C++ was designed to be compatible with C. This is a good thing if you have a lot of Java code that you want to migrate, or if you are uncomfortable with learning something new. However, Java is inflexible and overly complicated, and trying to maintain compatibility with Java prevented Groovy from being much better than Java. I quickly lost interest in Groovy so it's possible that I missed something - I would love to hear what advantages Groovy has compared to Scala or Clojure."

There's a Clojure group on the web and this spawned a discussion there entitled "Matt Raible: "Why is Clojure better than Scala or Groovy?"

Let's discuss this! There's a Clojure group... http://www.codetown.us/group/clojure Let's dip our feet in and see what all the talk is about. I'll start a discussion there. You can join in on the discussion: "Why Clojure?" in the Clojure group, where it belongs.


I am going to take another look at Eric's Clojure code that won the CodeTown Coding Contest #1 on Wari. It's a great way to see how things work from a practical perspective. The Compojure web framework is also something I want to see... Stay tuned!

Views: 267

Comment

You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!

Join Codetown

Comment by Michael Levin on January 19, 2010 at 11:32am
What are some examples where Clojure has fewer issues, Jackie?
Comment by Jackie Gleason on January 19, 2010 at 11:18am
I love Groovy but Clojure does seem to give you a lot of the simplicity with less byte code issues (although scala seems pretty good here). For now, however, I will continue using Groovy :-)

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

The New Data Commons MCP Server Unlocks a Wealth of Public Datasets for AI Developers

Google has recently introduced the Data Commons Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, a tool that enables AI developers and researchers to easily access the public dataset collection available through Data Commons.

By Sergio De Simone

Google DeepMind Launches Gemini 2.5 Computer Use Model to Power UI-Controlling AI Agents

Google DeepMind has recently released the Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model, a specialized variant of its Gemini 2.5 Pro system designed to enable AI agents to interact directly with graphical user interfaces. The new model allows developers to build agents that can click, type, scroll, and manipulate interactive elements on web pages.

By Robert Krzaczyński

Combining Continuous Delivery with Pair Programming: Lessons Learned

Pair programming and continuous integration can go hand-in-hand. Pushing to main multiple times a day is hard in isolation, leading to delays, large PRs, and merge issues, Ola Hast and Asgaut Mjølne Söderbom mentioned in their talk about continuous delivery with pair programming at QCon London. Pairing enables instant code review, easier refactoring, fewer bugs, and higher team resilience.

By Ben Linders

Azure Container Storage v2.0.0 Goes GA with Major Performance Boost

Microsoft has released Azure Container Storage v2.0.0, introducing significant performance enhancements and architectural simplifications for stateful workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The release focuses on deeper NVMe integration, streamlined user experience, and expanded open-source availability, while removing all service fees beyond underlying storage costs.

By Claudio Masolo

IBM Releases Granite-Docling-258M, a Compact Vision-Language Model for Precise Document Conversion

IBM Research has recently introduced Granite-Docling-258M, a new open-source vision-language model (VLM) designed for high-fidelity document-to-text conversion while preserving complex layouts, tables, equations, and lists.

By Robert Krzaczyński

© 2025   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service