My tic-tac-toe game is finally fully functional! The other fresh apprentice helped me look things over and I started noticing tons of mistakes as he went over it line by line. It’s funny how that happens, because I combed through that code at least 40 times last night, and having a fresh set of eyes on it had it fixed within 30 minutes. I guess that also goes to show the diminishing returns of trying to code once all of your energy is depleted. There were so many simple mistakes all over (calling variables in the wrong order, even though I’m the one who wrote the order of them).

Anyway, on to why you lovely people are here. My lesson of the day. Today we will explore the pros and cons of Clojure and Java.

Clojure

Pros

  • Conciseness: Clojure's syntax is short and sweet leading to less boilerplate code.
  • Functional: Clojure is a functional language which means it promotes immutability and first-class functions.
  • Interactive Development: Clojure's Repl (Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop) supports interactive development, allowing for very fast prototyping and testing.
  • Interoperability: Clojure runs on the Java virtual machine, and is seamlessly interoperable with Java. It can even use its libraries and frameworks.
  • Macros: Clojure's powerful macro system allows developers to extend the language and create domain specific languages

Cons

  • Learning Curve: Clojure's syntax has a steep learning curve for those coming from an imperative or object-oriented programming background.
  • Tooling: Clojure's tooling is not as mature or widely adopted as Java's.
  • Error Messages: Error Messages can sometimes be cryptic and hard to understand for beginners.
  • Community: While the community is vibrant, it is also small which makes finding libraries and support challenging.

Java

Pros

  • Mature Ecosystem: Java has a very well established and vast ecosystem with a wide range of libraries and tools
  • Performance: Java is known for its performance and often used in high-performance applications.
  • Community and Support: Java has a huge community with tons of support for when you get stuck.
  • Backwards Compatibility: Older code has no issue running on newer JVM versions.

Cons

  • Verboseness: Java is very verbose which leads to tons more boilerplate code.
  • Mutability: Java does has some immutable data structures, but they are not as integrated into the language as much as Clojure.
  • Concurrency: Managing concurrency in Java can be a bit of a pain.