It’s no secret that I’ve been interested in Lisp for quite a while. Lately, that has meant Clojure. Clojure is a new Lisp dialect that runs on top of the JVM. That means it has the power of Lisp (macros, dynamic typing, etc.) combined with the power of the JVM. The synergy reminds me of an old bumper sticker I saw years ago: “C: combining the speed of assembly with the power of assembly.” We’ve moved on a bit since then, but still. :)
Anyway, you should check out Clojure. It is easily the most exciting technology I’ve seen in years…probably since I first saw .NET in June of 2000. Even beyond just being a Lisp that actually has vast libraries (one of the main complaints against Lisps of the past) is the fact that there are some truly brilliant features of the language above and beyond what other Lisps sport.
One of the cool things I’d heard was that Clojure will run on top of IKVM.NET, which is a .NET implementation of the JVM. I figured that if there were a reasonable story for .NET interop, I’d be able to use Clojure to drive .NET code in a REPL. A REPL is a Read-Eval-Print Loop, which is a fancy way of saying “an interactive programming command line”. It’s like the immediate window in the Visual Studio debugger on steroids, and its absence is one of the increasing number of things that makes C# painful to use as I gain proficiency in more advanced languages.
Yes, I said it: C# is not an advanced language. If you think it is, then in my opinion you don’t know enough programming languages yet. :)
Intentionally provocative statements aside, here’s how you do it:
- Download and unzip ikvm.net. No installer required.
- Download Clojure. I recommend grabbing the head of the Subversion tree rather than the release that’s on the website.
- Build Clojure by running “ant jar” in the clojure directory. You’ll have to install Ant to do this if you haven’t already.
- Run “ikvmstub mscorlib.dll” to create mscorlib.jar, which will create the Java wrapper classes for the stuff in mscorlib.
- Launch a Clojure REPL via “ikvm –cp \path\to\clojure.jar;\path\to\mscorlib.jar clojure.lang.Repl”.
Now you have a working REPL, in which all the types in mscorlib are available to be driven by Clojure, which is most definitely an advanced language. Here’s a very simple example (the results of running the commands are indicated by =>):
(import '(cli.System DateTime))
=> nil
(new DateTime)
=> #<DateTime 1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM>
(.get_Now DateTime)
=> #<DateTime 11/19/2008 2:31:02 PM>
(.ToString (new DateTime) "R")
=> "Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 GMT"
You get the idea.
Of course this is probably only useful as an exploratory tool: if I were writing Clojure for real, I’d write it against the JVM, not against IKVM.NET. But I use the excellent SnippetCompiler all the time now, but it’s still not the quite same thing as a real REPL, so I’m excited to have a real REPL available.
And really, the reason I’m posting this is that I’m hoping it will be a sort of gateway drug for you, and that what this will really do is kick off your interest in Clojure itself. The website is a pretty good source of information, but you can also check out Stu Halloway’s Programming Clojure book. It’s available in Beta form here. I’ve been tech reviewing it, and even the early beta looks pretty good.
