There’s a big ‘ol thread going on down at comp.lang.lisp about Clojure vs. Common Lisp. I’m biased, of course, but I have to say that Clojure and Rich Hickey are holding their own against some of the top c.l.l. flamers.

But all the arguments about functional programming, software transactional memory, and reader macros miss what was, for me, the biggest reason to switch to Clojure. It’s about the libraries, stupid. Building on the JVM and providing direct access to Java classes/methods was the best decision in Clojure’s design. ‘Cause if it’s ever been done, anywhere, by anyone, someone’s done it in Java. Twice.

A few years ago, I tried to solve the Common Lisp library problem by writing a bridge from CL to Perl 5, and was laughed out of town. Rich Hickey, I’m told, spent years trying to bridge CL to Java, and never got very far. But Clojure works, and it works great. It’s a Lisp with a squintillion libraries. Who else can claim that?

So, if I wanted Lisp with Java libraries, why not use Kawa or ABCL … or heck, JRuby? Those are all fine projects, but they all suffer from mismatches between the “source” language (Scheme, CL, Ruby) and the “host” language (Java). There is never a one-to-one mapping between types in the source language and types in the host language. So you end up needing conversions like jclass/jmethod/jcall (ABCL) or primitive-static-method (Kawa). (JRuby is slightly better, but only because Ruby is closer to Java than CL/Scheme.)

Clojure doesn’t have this problem because it was designed from the ground up for the JVM. Clojure strings are java.lang.String, Clojure maps are java.util.Map, even Clojure functions are java.lang.Runnable (and java.lang.Callable). This makes it supremely easy to mix-n-match Clojure code with Java libraries and vice-versa. I know, because every day I use Clojure with complex Java libraries like Hadoop, Restlet, Lucene, and Solr. Everything just works. I don’t have to write any foreign-function interfaces or bridge code. In fact, using Java libraries in Clojure is often easier than using them in Java!

Clojure may not be a programming language for the next hundred years, as Arc aspires to be. But it’s a great language if you want to get stuff done right now.

Just a little self-promotion: I’ll be presenting at the New York Hadoop User Group on Tuesday, February 10 at 6:30. I’ll talk about how I use Hadoop for AltLaw.org, including citation linking, distributed indexing, and using Clojure with Hadoop.

Update 2/28: My slides from this presentation are available from the Meetup group files.