My point was not to translate the method name, it was to point out that (++) is anti-Clojure. I wanted to refactor the title to avoid mutability. I.e., "return the increment of clojure", not "change the value of clojure".
Well, I agree with you that isn't fantastic marketing. But neither is using a mutator function name to describe a talk on a functional language.
Rich Hickey loves to rail against nonsensical constructs/concepts like @date.day = 3, and I'm guessing he is very against the (++) method, as well. (How can you tell one number to become another number?)
I haven't done anything with Clojure, though I'm curious and wondering if would be worth my while. I'm already familiar with languages covering similar territory (Erlang, other Lisp dialects), but I haven't done much with the JVM. Also, the lack of tail-call optimization in Clojure is off-putting to me, but it looks several good design trade-offs elsewhere would probably make up for it.
That's not TCO, that's just an optimization for individual recursion. You might be able to use it for multiple forms under the same recur (like w/ "labels"), but it's very different when it applies to everything.
With TCO, you can use a set of mutually-recursive functions - you can set up a FSM via tail calls, use CPS for backtracking (and many other things), a re-entrant virtual machine where each opcode is a tail call (rather than a giant switch/case or lots of gotos), etc. Being able to use function calls like "gotos with arguments" (but with local scopes, etc.) can make some constructs much easier to read, reason about, etc.
I'm not that familiar with the implementation of the JVM, but AFAICT it's due to difficulties setting up tail calls efficiently in JVM bytecode.
As soon as the JVM supports it Clojure will support it. For me recur and trampoline are quite ok. I would want to miss on clojure because of TCO but I don't know what would be possible with TCO. I hope I can learn that in one of the books I have here :)
And yeah, I thought of mentioning trampolines, didn't know that it already had a readymade one. Sometimes they add too much overhead, but often it's still a good trade-off.
Do you mean the question if it was worth your while? If it was I would say yes because its a modern list that fixes old lisp problems, learn from the new languages and is pretty fast.
You can do optimized mutual-recursion in Clojure as well, using (trampoline). As with the optimized self-recursion using (recur), it's more work and not as nice as built-in TCO, but this is likely as good as it gets for now, given the current limitations of the JVM.
