As a genuine interest, please could you clear up what is meant by "Lisp All The Way Down."? I've implemented my own Lisp interpreter in Scheme before, and I looked at the interpreter from McCarthy's original paper, but in both of these, the interpreter still required some language (albeit one with list-processing procedures) to begin with. My experience would be that there's nothing special with Lisp in this regard, just that its _really_ easy to parse, but I still hear this claim often enough - am I missing something here?
And to answer your post, I'd say that Clojure does give you what you need - it gives you the axioms, it gives you defmacro - the rest is history. All those other library functions you can think of in a more abstract sense ("George's problem"), and in the end these should be machine code no matter which HLL they were originally written in.
The Lisp way has always been very dynamic - you can change things, even when they're orbiting Mars, but Clojure is functional, you generally don't change things. So in that sense, Clojure is not a true Lisp, but only because it chooses a different set of trade-offs, and if you don't like that then its fine, but it doesn't make Clojure evil, just different.
> please could you clear up what is meant by "Lisp All The Way Down."
"Lisp All The Way Down" is when you can select any part of the system - and the full source (written in the same basic concepts as the rest of the system, including the program you are writing) of the element will pop up. Any changes you make will take effect immediately and in real time. We had this in 1985. Why can't we have it now?
> it doesn't make Clojure evil, just different
The language is being promoted as the long-awaited, Messiah-like successor to Common Lisp. That is the main source of my annoyance.
"The language is being promoted as the long-awaited, Messiah-like successor to Common Lisp."
sigh
Rich Hickey explains what he thinks are the good parts of his language, but I would hardly say he has a messianic complex about it. A lot of people (myself included) like it because it combines interesting ideas with the pragmatism of fitting into the popular Java ecosystem. Perhaps a desire to have everything converted to a single language is more indicative of messianic thinking?
Common Lisp is a wonderful language, certainly worth learning. But it somehow seems to induce a bunker mentality in its users.
And to answer your post, I'd say that Clojure does give you what you need - it gives you the axioms, it gives you defmacro - the rest is history. All those other library functions you can think of in a more abstract sense ("George's problem"), and in the end these should be machine code no matter which HLL they were originally written in.
The Lisp way has always been very dynamic - you can change things, even when they're orbiting Mars, but Clojure is functional, you generally don't change things. So in that sense, Clojure is not a true Lisp, but only because it chooses a different set of trade-offs, and if you don't like that then its fine, but it doesn't make Clojure evil, just different.