Wed, 19 May 2010

Is Clojure the Answer, or Assembler?

The ongoing saga of my project of learning new programming languages and eventually getting some real software written with one or more of them has been derailed again—this time by a new(ish) entry in the Lisp family, Clojure.

I already knew about it, but had been disinclined to delve into it because of its foundations in Java, a language I really dislike. But I’ve seen a few tempting things about it recently and the stuff I’ve been reading seems to show that you can use it without having to get into real Java. If that’s true, I’m interested.

The principal features I need in any language that’s going to engage me are useful tools for managing concurrency, a coherent and not overly verbose syntax to make things easy for the human readers, decent performance and portability to all the free operating system platforms I care about.

Of course, there’s also the business of getting close to the machine—something I think all programmers need to be comfortable with—and for that I’m looking at X86 Assembler. I last did lots of coding in Assembler when the Z80 was king of the hill and 2 MHz was fast. Lots of my small business customers had machines that had no hope of running anything serious unless it was written in Assembler. But I’ve hardly looked at it since the decline of the Z80, so it seemed like time to complement my focus on very high level languages with a bit of low level stuff.

I’ve found a few references to modern Assembly Languages and plan to get up to speed a bit with that over the next few months as a counterpoint to my functional languages.

Posted at: 20:09

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