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0 pointsmahmud16y ago0 comments

Python is an excellent language in the hands of a competent pythonista: your programming career will thank you if you stuck with one language and learned its ins and outs over 3-4 years.

Libraries are add-ons and most can be ported and rewritten in your favorite language with more natural idioms. SWIG is nowadays the equalizer; it makes the entire C world callable from your favorite pet language. Stuff like LLVM will take you even further, once you know what you're really doing. In the mean time, use foreign functions and web service to bridge the gap where it exists.

My advice to Clojure programmers is to learn Lisp and mine its rich heritage for beautiful designs. A few months spent on a full CMUCL installation will make you a much better programmer for the rest of your lives: I was a Win32/COM guy writing GUIs for a living. When I discovered CMUCL I saw stuff I couldn't imagine. I was able to put buttons in the Unix shell and attach callbacks to all underlined text in an editor buffer. Stuff like that prepared me for DOM scripting with jquery. Look at Smalltalk and SML too.

A personal note to Clojure web framework guys, specially people using Compojure: take a look at Hunchentoot and copy all its good parts. I develop on Hunchentoot and everyday I discover an engineering decision made by its author that just humbles me. Good code makes you respect its author.

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runevault16y ago

I've not looked at it in a long time but Hunchentoot is certainly an excellent piece of engineering, and one of the things I was certainly interested in using at the time I was attempting to get into SBCL development.

I should go back and look at it's code again, and see what new ideas I can get out of it now that I've come back to lisp style syntax, though obviously w/o CLOS and the MoP.

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