If not Java, why not then go with Lisp?

[yarek]

Given that the current Oracle lawsuit is seriously denting Jave's image, and given that one of the early intention for Java was to drag C++ developers half way to Lisp, do you think now would be a good time to consider Lisp on earnest? BTW, how does the lawsuit affect Clojure?

[kevbin]

Swap Oracle for Sun, Google for Microsoft, Dalvik for the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine, 2010 for 1997 and I don't see the difference: one big-ass company with a lot of money going after another big-ass company with a lot of money. After a bunch of feisty lawyering, one will pay the other and they'll swap pieces of paper allowing them to go on as before: getting you to write software for their technology stack so they can brag about adoption, penetration, and the unparalleled quality of freely-available libraries for their platform; lather, rinse, repeat.

Regardless, Clojure will remain the best way to survive the twilight of the Java era.

[hga]

Disagree: Sun v. Microsoft was strictly a battle on a licensing contract, not a use of probably generic/bogus? patents against an independent piece of software. And the end result was pretty much the death of Microsoft's version of Java ("Visual Studio 2005 was the last release to include J#" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%2B%2B#Visual_J.23).

A similar outcome in SCOracle v. Google would be the capping and pretty fast death of Android....

"Regardless, Clojure will remain the best way to survive the twilight of the Java era."

Well, if you're a Lisp fan like me (some Common Lisp fans are fond of Armed Bear Common Lisp: http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/); others strenuously disagree from both the Lisp ("Clojure is a terrifying meld of a beloved character and an unreasoning alien onslaught. http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/aqcqx/how_a_common_lis... ) and non-Lisp camps.

[serichsen]

Is the lawsuit not about the VM technology, all languages running on it thus being affected the same?

[mahmud]

There is more to programming language choice than syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Like, economics.

Lisp is not a replacement for Java, and never will be. In the same way that a sports car is not a replacement for the municipal bus system.

[spooneybarger]

There are an awful lot of assumptions there... the largest being that this is going to have a large impact on Java. I remember years ago lots of hyperbole about how Microsoft's J++ and Sun's suit was going to spell the end of Java and here we are now...

Other points:

When I've looked at C++, Java and Lisp- I have never been able to see anything that would make me take that 'halfway to lisp' comment seriously.

Clojure is just a language that runs on the jvm. There is nothing about the current lawsuit that should have any technical or legal impact on Clojure.

[hga]

Well, it did largely spell the end of Java on the desktop.

The comment is by Guy Steele and at the very least by finally making GC mainstream I agree.

Clojure as it stands now seems to be safe, although we just don't know what "crazy" things Oracle will do now that it's "weaponized" Java. Just having to think about potential legal issues now or in the future where you didn't previously adds friction where there wasn't any before, which is never good. We're also seeing a lot more interest in the CLR version of Clojure, and to the extent effort is diverted from the JVM version, to that or to ones hosted on something else, this may not be a good thing.

In the longer term, this quote struck me as the most apt WRT to Clojure or any other language that uses the JVM in unusual ways (particularly the GC of functional languages) http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/08/oracle-google-la...:

Forrester Research analyst John Rymer agrees: "I think this lawsuit casts the die on Java’s future," he said. "It will become a slow-evolving legacy technology. Oracle’s lawsuit links deep innovation in Java with license fees, and that will kill deep innovation in Java by anyone outside Oracle or startups hoping to sell out to Oracle. Software innovation just doesn’t do well in the kind of environment Oracle just created."

As Clojure matures, we'll be wanting to do "deep innovation" (such as in GC) and Oracle has cast a pall on doing that in Java/JVM space.