Scala, Clojure and Lisplets

2007-12-22T11:47:14-05:00

As a result of reading Steve Yegge's latest blog rant, I have discovered a few new interesting things. Steve's rant is very anti-Java for all the right reasons, but falls apart when it gets to the "So here's what I'm going to do about it" part. He's switching to another language, one that runs on the JVM, but not Lisp, Jython, JRuby or Groovy, but for apparently no good reason, JavaScript. Not that JavaScript is a bad language, but I see reason why you would choose that over Lisp, Python or Ruby, and he fails to offer one.

The good thing is that through the comments of this post I learned about a few things, either directly or indirectly. Some of these thing have been around for a long time, but hey, I'm just learning about them.

First, there is a ground swell of support for Scala. I checked out the docs on their site and does look like a very powerful, expressive language. It seems to have many of the features of Lisp without being a Lisp dialect. It is syntactically Java-ish, but unlike Groovy, which really for some reason just seems like much-needed syntactic sugar for Java, Scala feels lieke a completely different language. In other words, and not that this is saying Groovy is a bad thing, but Groovy really isn't conceptually different than Java, where as Scala is, with things like case classes, for example. This is a language I'll have to look into some more.

There is also a mention of a new List-dialect for the JVM called Clojure. Clojure creator Rich Hickey (you need a blog Rich) recently gave a presentation on Clojure at LispNYC and the audio and slides are there. Clojure has a bunch of interesting ideas in it which he explains in the presentation. Clojure has a literal syntax for vectors (a.k.a arrays, lists) and maps (a.k.a Hashtables, Dicts) in addition to the traditional lisp lists. It is not quite a purely functional language, but strongly encourages it, making it the default programming paradigm over object-orientation. I've been wanting to check out Haskell and Erlang to get familiar with the functional programming paradigm, but Clojure might be a good way to get some exposure to that as well.

Another thing I found is Lisplets, which was created by Rich Hickey as well a few years ago. It is a Java Servlet that packages up the entire environment of an HTTP request, request parameters, cookies, session, etc, into an S-expression that is then handed off to a Lisp interpreter that listens on a socket. Lisp then reads the s-expression, does whatever it does, and then returns data to the Servlet which gets sent to the client. Mod_lisp is based on a similar concept. I think it's kind of interesting to think of web development in this manner, with a definitive layer of abstraction between the processing of request into a data structure, and then processing the request based on that data structure.

PaulBarry.com - Scala, Clojure and Lisplets

Scala, Clojure and Lisplets