One Night With Clojure Makes a Scala Guy Humble | Agile Zone

Some years ago I wrote "Is Java 10x more verbose than Python (LOC)? A modest empiric approach" [1]. The most interesting comment quoted "PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE <i>YOU</i> ARE BETTER"from [2].<p>[1] <a href="http://codemonkeyism.com/comparing-java-and-python-is-java-10x-more-verbose-than-python-loc-a-modest-empiric-approach/" rel="nofollow">http://codemonkeyism.com/comparing-java-and-python-is-java-1...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_swit...</a>

As they say on another part of the internet, "pics or it didn't happen". For an example this short it would be so easy to show the code, and see how much the scala version could actually be improved.<p>The programming languages shootout has clojure down as a bit larger than scala for the same benchmarks: <a href="http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-language-is-best.php?calc=chart&#38;scala=on&#38;clojure=on&#38;xfullcpu=0&#38;xmem=0&#38;xloc=1&#38;nbody=1&#38;fannkuchredux=1&#38;meteor=1&#38;fasta=1&#38;fastaredux=1&#38;spectralnorm=1&#38;revcomp=1&#38;mandelbrot=1&#38;knucleotide=1&#38;regexdna=1&#38;pidigits=1&#38;chameneosredux=1&#38;threadring=1&#38;binarytreesredux=1&#38;binarytrees=1" rel="nofollow">http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-language-is-best...</a>

The program get shorter because the author learned more and improved it each time, not mainly because of the languages.<p>Mainstream programming languages do not seem to vary much in lines of code of programs: the range is maybe about 2 or 3. Here is evidence: <a href="http://www.hxa.name/minilight/#comparison" rel="nofollow">http://www.hxa.name/minilight/#comparison</a><p>This stands to reason. Look at everyday languages: they all have the same features -- they are perhaps surprisingly similar in basic structure. Control-flow, operations, data-primitives, data-compounds -- all are very similar. One of the more outlying is C: lacking common higher-level amenities like exceptions, nice data-structures, and particularly storage management, can expand code significantly.

A 10x reduction from Java-&#62;Clojure is IMHO suspicious. A ~2-3x reduction I would (just about) believe.<p>It's possible that some of the improvement came from having solved the same problem for the third time.

My only problem with Clojure is the terrible JVM start up time.<p>While I agree that for typical long running applications like web servers/web applications this isn't really an issue, the problem manifests itself when you want to write small scripts or small command line applications that have similar performance to their Java equivalent.<p>If you write a CLI app in Java, the application will execute almost instantly as soon as you run it, but with languages like Clojure/Scala you have to wait a long time.

The damning point against Scala there is that the Scala program is only about 30% the length of Java.<p>That's not enough savings to make up for the complexity of a language that seems like an unholy union of Perl, C++ and F#.<p>For me the breakthrough in Scala was understanding enough about how it works that I could interface with Scala code easily in Java. At that point I could copy any of those patterns in Java. They were a little more verbose than Scala, but more reliable because I wasn't worrying that some piece of magic was going to cause something extraordinary to happen.

I like what Clojure is trying to do, but comparing languages based purely on LOC is crazy.<p>Its almost like choosing one car over another because the first one looks better even if it does not have an engine.<p>At the end of the day, languages help you write code. Comparisons on how much time it would take to write the code would be much closer to usefulness and would be interesting (even though they would have also have their own challenges).<p>This would be a really hard test to do in the real world, but I would like to see the code generated by 2 teams over a year - each having 4-5 people and each having similar experiences (ideally 10 years of coding background).

1.) K [1] is shorter than Clojure, if LOC is a metric you love. 2.) Scala 8x more LOC than Clojure, I'm not believing this.<p>Or in other words, show some code.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)</a>