[PRL] [plt-internal] Video of Clojure talk

[Bryan Chadwick]

> Overall, I think the talk is interesting for a few reasons:
> 
> 1. He has a very clear vision of what *he* wants from his language,
> and how to get it, which I think is a rare condition in language
> designers.
> 2. His datastructure library made me envious.
> 3. His ideas about concurrency were the first ones I've seen that
> seemed notable in several years.

His ideas about limiting mutation are good... especially if he's coming out of 
industry!

His data structures aren't bad... but I actually have (purely functional) Java 
implementations of each of them in (List, Map, Set) with (non-mutating) 
iterators.  He seemed to spend a lot of time on these, but it's just standard 
interfaces that he took the time to provide with concrete syntax.  Looks almost 
straight out of Csu 213 lectures with the "seq"/"first"/"rest" discussion.

The dynamic "empty" is interesting, but I think there was a paper on that kind 
of thing (or something very close) a while ago ;)
("Synthesizing Object-Oriented and Functional Design to Promote Re-Use")

I agree with him on the concurrency... at least on the motivation of (mostly) 
functional programming, but I didn't get why the STM is so much better than 
Java/C# style locking... just a slightly higher level abstraction available in 
the language?

Bryan.