Steve Yegge v. Rich Hickey re: "Clojure just needs to start saying Yes"
One of my favorite things about Clojure is the things it's said "yes" to, as first-class language builtins: char, vector, set, and map notation; first class "vars" (actually thread locals), ways to manage and dereference state, Java interop that doesn't set your hair on fire, namespaces, keywords and namespaced keywords, and a whole bunch of features I'm probably forgetting.<p>Instead, Steve Yegge is asking for things that don't seem terribly important to me. Excluding loops from the language core is obvious; Clojure makes it really easy to use the functional style instead and loops would serve as a newbie trap. For the last two weeks I've been programming Clojure full-time and haven't used a single loop macro or loop-recur. He complains about the lack of circular dependencies; but no circular dependencies across namespaces is A Good Thing just as you shouldn't have circular dependencies across Java packages or C++ libraries. The guy he cites who declared macros evil is obviously not a part of 'mainstream' Clojure culture, and maybe someone can explain Yegge's anger about single-pass compilation, because I don't get it.<p>And of course, Clojure is a highly extensible language that has <i>implicitly</i> said Yes to a vast ideascape.