After discovering Clojure I have spent the last few days immersed in it.
What project types lend themselves to Java over Clojure, vice versa, and in combination?
What are examples of programs which you would have never attempted before Clojure?
I am looking to create a system which on signup will create a subdomain on my website for the users account area.
Clojure lends itself well to concurrent programming. It provides such wonderful tools for dealing with threading as Software Transactional Memory and mutable references.
ReplyDeleteAs a demo for the Western Mass Developer's Group, Rich Hickey made an ant colony simulation in which each ant was its own thread and all of the variables were immutable. Even with a very large number of threads things worked great. This is not only because Rich is an amazing programmer, it's also because he didn't have to worry about locking while writing his code. You can check out his presentation on the ant colony here.
If you are going to try concurrent programming, then I think clojure is much better than what you get from Java out of the box. Take a look at this presentation to see why:
ReplyDeletehttp://blip.tv/file/812787
I documented my first 20 days with Clojure on my blog
http://loufranco.com/blog/files/category-20-days-of-clojure.html
I started with the SICP lectures and then built a parallel prime number sieve. I also played around with macros.
What project types lend themselves to using Java over Clojure, vice
ReplyDeleteversa, or in combination?
A project where a GUI-building tool
(such as Matisse in Netbeans) is
needed would be a case where Java may
still be required. Anything done in
Java can be done in Clojure quite
readily, with proxy and gen-class if
needed, or just accessing Java as
needed (., doto, new, etc.). This
allows Clojure projects to easily use
Java libraries or legacy Java code.
Which programs which you would have never attempted before Clojure ?
Before I found Clojure, I was
contemplating a project that required
JDBC, would run in a servlet
container, and I anticipated doing a
lot of iterative development because
it wasn't clear what methods would
work for the data I needed to analyze.
I put it on the back burner because I
didn't have the time or patience for
the compile-debug- deploy-validation
cycling that Java requires. I've now
written the application in Clojure,
and I'm very pleased at the ease of
making changes on the fly and being
able to examine the results
immediately. Not to mention the joy
of lock-free programming and being
liberated from having to develop (and
refactor) class hierarchies.
- "MikeM" via the clojure@googlegroups.com mailinglist
What project types lend themselves to Java over Clojure, vice versa, and in combination?
ReplyDeleteIf you want to develop a framework that is to be consumed by Java and Clojure, I've found writing the main abstractions (interfaces ad base classes) in Java to be preferable over writing them in Clojure (I find Clojure's gen-class to be somewhat tedious and rather use proxy).
If you're a user of Hibernate or any other framework that makes heavy use of Java-annotations without offering a programmatic alternative, you'll have some trouble, since it's not trivial to emulate annotated POJOs with Clojure's data structures.
Apart from that, I've experienced no use cases for which Clojure is less appropriate than Java; you have to cope with the loss of static typing, of course, which feels somewhat disconcerting at first, but tends to go away.