Clojure Multimethods

Wow! Now this is weird! I honestly don’t know what to make of Clojure’s ad-hoc hierarchies. I have, I confess, been missing a little bit of the polymorphism I’m used to with classic OO class-hierarchies. This looks like it’s the answer to that. But hmmmm …. if I start down this path am I going …

Lazy Lists Are Late-Binding

A thought that struck me in the swimming pool today. Lazy lists are another kind of late-binding. Everyone hypes lazy lists by saying “wow! you can even have infinitely long lists!” To which the natural response is, “So what? The universe is finite and my life and this program are certainly finite, why should I …

Are Languages Still Evolving Towards Lisp?

My Quora answer to the question “Is it still reasonable to say mainstream languages are generally trending towards Lisp, or is that no longer true?“ Based on my recent experiments with Haskell and Clojure. Lisp is close to a pure mathematical description of function application and composition. As such, it offers one of the most …

Clojure

OK. Consider me won over. Lisp is great to work with. The things that grabbed me about FP in Erlang and Haskell (pattern-matching arguments, partial application, lazy evaluation) are all here. My code is as concise as Erlang and damned nearly as concise as Haskell (I think the line count is similar though the number …

Aaaargh! Quora. No! (Should I learn Clojure for Android programming?)

Having contrasted Quora, positively with StackOverflow, I find that Quora is also starting to play the “word-shaping” game by which either an algorithm or a tone-deaf moderator decides to constrain how you are allowed to express your questions 🙁 No idea why they really feel the need to do this. But it basically has the …