I’ve just heard about a fascinating new language that is a modern LISP built on top of JVM: Clojure. In fact, I’m downright excited, because LISP is probably my favorite language concept, and based on the following presentation, I am really impressed by the grokability of LISP-on-JVM. Here’s why: if you learned functional programming and object oriented programming in college, then you know absolutely everything you need, and you will immediately get it. 30 minutes flat.

Java is a terrible language for sketching out a quick script, but I am shocked by the parsimony and readability of Clojure. When I want to sketch out a concept, I always turn to Perl, but it is well known by now that Perl doesn’t scale well to a team, whereas Java excels. My dream is that with Clojure, both sketches and monolithic project-driven development can be accommodated.

RTFA: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/hickey-clojure

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2008, Rich Hickey discusses Clojure, which is an implementation of Lisp. Topics covered include Clojure features and syntax, example code, interoperation with Java, Clojure and functional programming, persistent data structures, concurrency semantics, references, transactions, software transactional memory, agents, implementation and pain points.