Fourteen Months with Clojure
I only worked with Clojure professionally for a couple of months, but the experience was less than stellar. Most of it probably had to do with the codebase being written by people without any experience, but a couple of problems could be traced back to the language itself.<p>I&#x27;m preparing to write a lengthy post comparing Clojure and Racket, the other Lisp I have been using for personal projects for a couple of years now. My opinion is that Racket is a better language overall, although it may be less practical in terms of writing production code and it certainly lacks some of the nice features Clojure brings. On the other hand, many of these nice features are available as libraries (not only in Racket - in most Lisps, including Elisp and Common Lisp).<p>For the last two years, I used StumpWM as my window manager and so I learned some Common Lisp. Again, as a language, I think Common Lisp is still better than Clojure, although it&#x27;s definitely stranger.<p>I use Emacs as my default &quot;computing environment&quot;, so I naturally learned Elisp, too. This is the only Lisp I used which I&#x27;d consider inferior to Clojure, but even then it works quite well for its use-case.<p>All in all, from the perspective of Lisp family of languages, Clojure doesn&#x27;t seem to be exceptional in any aspect. It does have nice features, and I bet it feels much better compared to Java, but it also has some downsides to it which are irritating when coming from Racket or Common Lisp.