I’ve been following Tim Bray’s excellent Concur.next article series covering approaches to concurrency in various languages, and currently (no pun intended!) covering Clojure. The latest article talks about a super efficient log parsing implementation done by Alex Osborne an includes the following comment:

Lots of the performance wins come from dipping into Java-land (AtomicLongs, LinkedBlockingQueue), which is perfectly OK, but a Clojure purist would probably see those occasions as maybe highlighting gaps in that language’s coverage.

I’d take issue with that, one of the real strengths of Clojure it that it has easy and fast access to the whole Java ecosystem. As Rich says:

Clojure is designed to be a hosted language, sharing the JVM type system, GC, threads etc. It compiles all functions to JVM bytecode. Clojure is a great Java library consumer, offering the dot-target-member notation for calls to Java.

That seems pretty clear to me. I wonder if the people claiming to be Clojure purists are all coming from a Lisp background rather than the Java world?