Considering Clojure

I've been looking at clojure for awhile, now. I liked lisp, back in the day, but never got particularly good at it. Since then, I've done some minor projects in Scheme (Chicken scheme, to be specific). The syntax and programming styles really "did it" for me. Problems just seemed simpler to solve.

When I was working on an earlier revision of this project in .NET, I passed up on F#. I used it for some small test apps, liked it a lot, but decided against it. The main reason is that nobody else is using it. This might change with its inclusion in VS.NET 2010, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Besides, C# has a lot of functional-like syntax these days, so while I may miss some of the F# sugar (pattern matching, for example), I don't feel all that hemmed in with C#.

This next chunk of code I have to write for my little indexing project is discrete from the rest of the project. If clojure doesn't take off as more than an interesting niche language, I could easily find myself replacing it with bog-standard Java.

'Cause I have to admit it: Java sucks. It isn't that it is hard, it's that it is a pain in the ass. In some ways, I preferred programming in C - I spent a lot less time working, it seems. Maybe because I did so much in C; I don't know. I do know that just about every language I've tried since then (except PIC) has been less of a hassle.

I do like all the JVM application containers, though. To me, that's the real winner for Java.

Which leaves me with the whole "changing horses in midstream" problem. I really should write the whole thing in one language. You wouldn't think that would be too much to ask, would you? I certainly wouldn't hesitate to ask it of someone else.

So, I'll probably keep poking around through the tutorial. I may end up with working code which I end up using for the next bit. At the very least, I'll have a good idea as to whether or not this was a good idea.