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#joker
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2024-02-09
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sheetz04:02:15

I'm a newbie so forgive my ignorance. I have a small foundation in Clojure and LISP in general, and I love the interactive environment that allows me to experiment and play around with. For a beginner, can somebody tell me the benefit of using Joker over plain Clojure ? Eventually, I think I will most likely have to learn a lower-level backend language such as C or Go. I've had all kinds of problems with setting up Java on my system and tracking down all the horrendous errors. I've been looking at Go as an alternative to "a more simpler" learning curve than Java, and ran into Joker. I love the LISP syntax which is why I stay within this list: https://github.com/dundalek/awesome-lisp-languages

Candid17:02:17

@U05N5T43AF5 Joker may be a little bit easier to get started with since it’s a single binary with no dependencies. It doesn’t really require any knowledge of Go, unless you want to contribute to the development of Joker itself. It’s pretty good for one-off scripts and simple automation. This is what we use it for at work. However, if you intend to write something “serious”, you’ll need to learn Clojure. The core of Joker and Clojure are very similar, but Clojure is much more mature, with a lot more capabilities (due to excellent interop with Java) and it’s much more performant for long running processes (courtesy of JVM). Perhaps most importantly, Clojure is a widely adopted language in the industry (as far as LISPs go anyway), whereas Joker is a small project suited for tinkering and scripting. Hope this helps.