How weird, the dupe detection must have some sort of time sensitivity built in... this was posted a couple of weeks ago with the same URL:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441485" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441485</a>
I've become enamored with PLT Scheme. Clojure main appeal appears to be that it is on the JVM (with all those darn libraries), not that it is a new/beautiful and novel language. I am a proponent of porting Clojure to run without the JVM - has anyone heard of such a project?
I'm coming to agree with him about Clojure being the best language out currently. I've used both it and SBCL and I prefer the former, because SBCL's lack of up-to-date libraries (compared to the JVM) can be frustrating.<p>I wouldn't call macros a hard necessity, however. You can accomplish quite a lot, quickly, in Ocaml or Haskell, even though they're statically typed languages with no macros. Functors, type classes, and various cool design patterns (e.g. monads) provide a lot of the abstraction and code reuse that macros provide. Also, I'd rather use a statically-typed language for a project with 4+ developers.<p>I think that 90% of Lisp's headway over a language like Java comes from the functional paradigm, and 10% from macros.