I am looking at Clojure more these days. Right now I am going through the Clojure lectures on Pluralsight. I came for the concurrency. I stayed for the elegance.
From what I have heard, it handles concurrency better than most other languages. At Lone Star Ruby Conf, a few presenters talked about how Ruby will handle the coming “concurrency freight train”. Robert Martin said that we should look at a purely functional language. I think that was a hint to look at Clojure and avoid Scala.
I am looking at a great site called Clojure Docs, which I heard about from Colin Jones. It has better documentation than the official Clojure site. The docs at cloure.org for ->> are not useful at all. And good luck googling that.
A few weeks ago I attended a presentation at Geekfest about logic programming in Clojure. One of the examples the presenter gave was about chess. He programmed the rules of chess in his application. From there, you could arrange some pieces, and the applicaiton could tell you if that particular arrangement could have resulted from a legitimate game of chess, and what the moves would have been, and also what could happen going forward.
Someone asked me why you couldn’t do that with a rule engine, and honestly I did not have an answer.
But still, I can see how logic programming could be useful for scientific research. You could say that some material could handle X pounds of pressure per square inch. Good stuff.
Image from World Digital Library, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Ashburnham Pentateuch, or Tours Pentateuch, a Latin manuscript of the first five books of the Old Testament from the 6th century or 7th century. Its place of origin is unknown.