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Rich Hickey on Clojure


Rick Hickey really impressed me in this potcast when he started talking about the details of Clojure's implementation of “mutable…ish” data and how he made it happen within the problematic that is the Java Virtual Machine in terms of resources, although the JVM has become more and more efficient within the newer versions; but in that sense the creation of a resource-efficient data structures certainly deserves a lot of admiration from me or anyone that nowadays dedicates its career to data-science because it takes a very clever mind to abstract all those models.
Clojure is presented to you as a new paradigm or tool for your career or projects it can sound super difficult or creepy in the way of syntax complexity, but the truth is that once you dominate it, it becomes another “weapon” in the duty of any computologyst or computer systems engineer.
Clojure is an amazing and powerful language because it is the (almost) perfect link between the objects-oriented paradigm and the unknown (at least for me at the beginning) Functional Programming paradigm as it runs mainly using the Java Virtual Machine, which is platform agnostic by design. Which provides the program a set of data structures and utility functions that can be nonexistent or very difficult to implement into a cleaner implementation of Lisp. Hickey mentioned that Vectors and Maps are unique to Clojure, and it certainly is an interest in terms of the relationship between them and vectors and bijective mappings in the mathematical sense. 
One of the most important barriers in Functional programming from an object-oriented perspective is the lack of variables or directly manipulable data. In my opinion once you overcome this barrier, you can take a really good advantage of all the benefits of it; just like the integrity of information through the function-chain as it does make you a better programmer overall.


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