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Entry #5: Rich Hickey on Clojure

“Rich Hickey on Clojure” is a 58 minute long podcast produced in 2010 by Software Engineering Radio. In this podcast, Rich Hickey discusses the characteristics and capabilities of the Clojure programming language and talks about his professional background.

Clojure is a Lisp based programming language, however, Rich Hickey gives an important approach to mention the differences between Lisp and Clojure, and the motivations for creating Clojure since he is the creator of it.

Lisp and Clojure are functional programming languages, but Clojure is also an excellent object-oriented programming language. Clojure is designed to run code almost everywhere, since it runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Rich Hickey talks about the details in Clojure's implementation of mutable data and how he made it possible within the JVM, moreover, he also talked about defining resource-efficient data structures which is very difficult to design and implement.

One of the main advantages of Clojure is that is based on Lisp, so all of the advantages and benefits of Lisp applies to Clojure. Clojure is a JVM-based language which means that we have full access to Java's API and all the libraries that have been implemented for Java. Furthermore, Clojure has the advantage that its data structures are immutable, so it is a perfect option for recursion or concurrency.

Despite of its advantages, Clojure is not a very popular programming language, it is known that some startups companies have begun to use it because it gives them a competitive advantage. Besides, Rich Hickey gives some reasons as to why Clojure is not a mainstream programming language, and it is because Clojure is not targeted to the conventional programmers, it is more focused on the kind of programmer who wants to maximize efficiency by saving time with the simplicity of Clojure. Additionally, Clojure is a powerful programming language for developing Artificial Intelligence.

Podcast: Hickey, R. (2010). Rich Hickey on Clojure. Recovered from http://www.se-radio.net/2010/03/episode-158-rich-hickey-on-clojure/

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