Remember last week when we mentioned that Clojure may be the new hot programming language of the moment? That idea just got a bit more support today as Heroku announced support for Clojure. Clojure joins Ruby and more recently Node.js on Heroku’s platform-as-a-service.
Clojure is a dialect of Lisp and runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It was created to give Lisp programmers a modern environment for development. It’s a general purpose programming language but it’s selling point is functional programming. According to the Heroku blog post, “Clojure covers a new use case on the Heroku platform: components which demand correctness, performance, composability; and optionally, access to the Java ecosystem.”
Lisp is a programing language created in 1958 and widely popular in artificial intelligence development. It has a cult following that puts Ruby and Python to shame.
Functional programming has seen a resurgence of interesting in the past few years, but languages that emphasize the function programming paradigm have been largely overlooked by platform-as-a-service providers thus far. Heroku is the first PaaS we’ve seen support Clojure. Cloud Foundry, VMware’s PaaS, recently added support for Scala, another general purpose language often used for functional programming. We’ve also heard that an Erlang PaaS will launch this year.
If you want to see a list of PaaSes sorted by language, check here and here.
Lisp alien logo by Conrad Barski, M.D.
