ABaboytsov·Jan 25, 2013
It's hard to compare Clojure and Scala. Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language with strong OOP support and functional support. It's arguably more verbose than Clojure but looks much more similar to Java.
Clojure is a Lisp. Lisp stands aside all other programming languages, first of all, because it supports syntactic abstraction (a.k.a. "code is data"). Hardcode addicts (I'm not one of them) say there are only two programming languages - Lisp and non-Lisp.
Here's a good comparison of Scala and Clojure: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1314732/scala-vs-groovy-v...
When we made the decision to switch to Clojure, several things affected it, in no particular order:
- we had some people who were already very proficient in Lisp
- we liked how expressive and compact it was
- Lisp is considered to possess immense expressive power (see
Read the rest
http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html)
- we were enamoured by Cascalog (http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-cascalog-a-clojure-ba...), and it's written in and for Clojure. This one payed off very well.
- Lisp has a reputation of being great at manipulating data: lists, graphs, etc.
Here's a good answer from one of our engineers: http://www.quora.com/Clojure/Why-would-someone-learn-Clojure
As for libraries, both Clojure and Scala are JVM-based, and Clojure has a very good syntax for Java interop, so all Java libraries are available to us. But, of course, Clojure community also spits out libraries like crazy, for example, take a look at this marvel which we use in Drake for parsing: https://github.com/joshua-choi/fnparse.