There is a lot of hype around Clojure and after a long time not really taking notice of it I recently decided to take a look at it. I have to admit that I am an old Lisp guy. I did work with Lisp for quite some years and even got paid for it. And I really liked it. I keep telling people, that Lisp is my “native programming tongue”. So I thought that would be a good idea and it should’nt be to difficult to get a grasp in Clozure.

Well, after 20 minutes I stopped. As a old lisp man, I was really annoyed about the rape of the uniqely strict an clear syntax, that characterizes Lisp (and Scheme). It is is one of the basic strengths of Lisp, that has vanished in Clojure. Additonally I noticed that it was a completely stripped Lisp, no CLOS etc. Of course this is somehow the point with Clojure, as it targets stateless dealing with concurrency.

Anyway, I just didn’t like it :smirk:

So I thought - one advantage of Clozure is its JVM runtime and general Java interoperability. Isn’t there another lisp implementation for the JVM, referably a Common Lisp? And yes, there is ABCL, Armed Bear Common Lisp. Immediately I fell in love with the name. I gave it a try and yes, quite nice, but I found that it’s compile time is quite bad (I did not measure the runtime performance). I was used to a different behavior in my old MCL and ACL times.

Then I stumbled across SBCL - Steel Bank Common Lisp. And this is it. Extremely fast, runtime and compile time. A lot faster than Python or Ruby for example. But it is not a JVM language, it brings its own JVM. But in a number of implementations, Linux, OSX, Windows - who needs a JVM then. I guess I should take a deeper look at it.