People who use Parinfer rather than Paredit when learning Clojure really like it. The concept is available in the Clojure mode in all the usual suspects of IDEs (IntelliJ Cursive, emacs Cider, etc.)
The size of the community is not as important as the value of what is available. It's just not widely known, or maybe there's still much potential yet unrealized.
This is an oldie but a goodie on how interactive an experience you can have when using Clojure on the front end and backend of a web app:
This project is the most recent and most promising iteration of someone making a very visual interactive tool for introspecting on data structures in the REPL environment
The simplicity of the visual language that Scratch provides inherits from the simplicity of Lisp, via Logo. The Logo language (& the Mindstorms pedagogical philosophy), which is what Scratch builds off of in a visual way, was implemented as a dialect of Lisp.
From anecdotal experience, I do believe that the choice of a Lisp for Logo was an important criterion in the simplicity of the language, and thus the high impact of the learning impact.
I do think that if we find Scratch useful and powerful, then we should really re-/consider Clojure as an important language for real general purpose programming work, for many reasons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-53JoGPE4
The thing about chili peppers is that they're not healthy (have medicinal benefits) in the way peppercorn and long pepper do. Capsaicin can be harmful in large quantities, IIUC.
There are South Indian foods and snacks like venpongal and methu vadai that use whole peppercorn, not chili peppers. Tomato is another colonialism byproduct, but there are still people who make versions that use lemons instead of tomatoes. A common homemade drink for sick people is made from grinding dried ginger, coriander seeds, and black pepper. These are all daily foods. But you're right, few households or restaurants are 100% free of these 400 year old import crops.
Obviously, chili pepper is used where peppercorn or ground black pepper used to be, for the reasons in the parent comment. It also makes sense that black pepper would have been used in various dishes because it enhances the potency of the medicinal properties of turmeric by an order of magnitude. It wouldn't be hard to go back to black pepper, I imagine, with a little retooling of recipes to rebalance flavors.
I don't subscribe to the opinion that all "imports" are bad, and that everything indigenous was miraculous and glorious. For goodness' sake, you probably typed your message on a Chinese-made device in a language that is not your mother tongue, as did I. That doesn't make us less of anything, does it?
Even the quintessentially southern Idli is rumoured to be a 12th century import brought down to the south by migrating Saurashtrians. (Mentioning this over other theories, since it seems to have the strongest documentary evidence). That isn't going to stop me enjoying my Idli with Sambar (which too is apparently a culinary import!).
By and large, cultural exchange makes the world a richer place. Are there unsavoury parts to human history? Yes. Even the Cholas (for example) conquered and colonized lands far away from where they were born, did they not?
You seemed to have misunderstood what I was saying.
I was pointing out that specifically in the case of chili spice, I don't think it's good for the body. There are data to support the idea that eating large amounts of capsaicin is harmful to the body:
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/chili-peppers#dow...
Meanwhile, go to the vitamin supplement section of your nearest store, look at the ingredients of turmeric tablets, and you'll see they have a disclaimer that they have trace amounts of black pepper to magnify the effect of turmeric.
Everything else you said is fine by me because I wasn't arguing for it or against it.
Oranges and millets probably came from China, bananas probably came from SE Asia (and these things probably before the Sangam age, which is before the Pallavas and the height of the Cholas, so clearly exchange was happening for longer than we know).
A slight correction to what you said, idli came from a Pallava king in the 13th century who married a bride from a Indonesia who in turn brought along cooks who liked using rice. They combined rice with lentils to make idli:
https://youtu.be/7pxEXHxSQzU
To be clear, I know that rice has been grown in South Asia since the time of the Indus Valley Civilization (>= 4500 years ago), but all I'm saying is specifically about idli.
To add to that and concur that Rich generally doesn't have such un-nuanced strong opinions without context, see his talk Effective Programs. He explains what Clojure is good for and isn't good for, and says more clearly it so depends on what you're doing.
He doesn't organize the Clojure conferences, but I'd imagine that if he didn't see any value in any context for static typing, there wouldn't have been a talk about Typed Racket and static typing researchers as keynote speakers, etc.
And FWIW, spec is a library trying to come as close as possible to the imaginary midpoint of static and dynamic typing, but in a Clojure-y way.
I agree with the grandparent comment. The parent comment sounds like a random and non representative sampling of what makes Clojure unique.
Both parent and grandparent correctly identify that many Clojure ideas come from elsewhere. Lisp and hosting on the JVM were not new. Immutability and persistent data structures weren't new ideas.
But putting them into one and making it performant was a paper published by people in the Clojure community (Rich was the lead author).
Clojure describes itself as data-oriented. That means not just the primacy of data, but of plain data, unadorned: https://youtu.be/VSdnJDO-xdg
What I find almost unique Clojure is that there's a philosophy to it that resonates throughout in it's design decisions: simplicity. Data is simpler than code, and code is simpler than macros, so prefer data and leave macros so a last resort. Libraries are simple, frameworks are complex. Plain data is simple, and the knock on effects of every library converting to & from plain data is powerful. But it only reveals itself after using Clojure for a while. Immutability allows for simpler code that you can reason about. Isolating state into containers allows you to characterize, control, and reduce touch points with state, which is necessary yet a source of complexity.
You can see the same set of ideas that underpin the design of Clojure to be present in follow on library additions (reducers/transducers, async, Datomic, etc). There's simplicity, often manifested in immutability and the associative model of information (everything is a map), at least.
This I strongly agree with. Clojure's insistence on carrying through with its core immutable collections everywhere it can is a defining feature of the language IMO.
I mean at the end of the day we're talking about personal influence so I can't really argue with you thinking that what I'm talking about is random.
Nonetheless personally I don't find the JVM to be a definitional feature of Clojure. E.g. Clojurescript feels just as Clojure-y to me as JVM Clojure.
Likewise I think simplicity is in the eyes of the beholder.
Personally I think (the current presentation of) transducers and core.async are both too complex (and in the former's case complected to use a Clojure-ism).
The latter I think is better served by manifold and the former, man I really need to write this up at some point since this keeps coming up, but transducers don't need to be higher order functions on reducers. Every transducer is exactly equivalent to a function from a -> List b (again yes this presentation is agnostic of source and therefore holds even for something like channels despite the presence of a concrete list). The only thing that you get from its presentation as a higher order function is reusing function composition which I view as bearing all the hallmarks of complection. It goes the "opposite" direction you'd expect and it's hardly ever used as "function" composition (when's the last time you composed a transducer with something that wasn't another transducer?).
Although I started the above project around the same time as Ramsey started his project in the original link (CLisp in Arabic), they were two entirely independent things. Ramsey's project is a 100% translation, whereas my project scales to other natural languages but is not a 100% translation.
Tim and I worked on trying to make programming in other languages easier as a means to help more kids learn programming, and learn FP the Lisp way, which we explain as more natural.
Same here, can you let me know, too? I'm just an idle observer, more often interested in consuming the polished findings, but am utterly fascinated and impressed by the work required to get there.
Can you also comment on how the current decipherments are going? And how much progress has been made in the Dravido-Elamite angle?
This book came out that republishes incomplete research that establishes cognates and place name parallels, although no grammatical connections made. In light of the progress made in the IVC script, it seems compelling.
https://tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=79&artid=38813
In the meantime since this article was published in 2013, for IVC in terms of a Dravidian language, there's been a lot of progress in terms of script decipherment (to the point where the theory has become proof), archaeology, and DNA analysis that support each other consistently.
The thesis that the IVC language may have been related to Dravidian is dead as a dodo. Only Tamil nationalists pursue it. There's really nothing to the Elamo Dravidian hypothesis also. For a time it was pushed feverishly by a David McAlpin. The theory rested on a slender footing. Essentially there was a Dravidian affiliated language called Brahui spoken in Baluchistan by a small number which raised possibility of IVC language being Dravidian and at another remove, an Elamo Dravidian language family. But the Brahui language is now accepted by most experts as a medieval period (i.e., 1000-1600 AD) immigrant into the highlands of Baluchistan from Central India. This has basically blown the stuffing off the Dravidian hypothesis for IVC - not that it was ever very strong. The Dravidian language family, in the opinion of experts, continues to be an isolate confined to southern India.
https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/
The size of the community is not as important as the value of what is available. It's just not widely known, or maybe there's still much potential yet unrealized.
This is an oldie but a goodie on how interactive an experience you can have when using Clojure on the front end and backend of a web app:
https://figwheel.org/
This project is the most recent and most promising iteration of someone making a very visual interactive tool for introspecting on data structures in the REPL environment
https://github.com/djblue/portal