Clojure vs. Common Lisp vs. Haskell vs. SQL Comparison Chart

Clojure is a robust, practical, and fast programming language with a set of useful features that together form a simple, coherent, and powerful tool. Clojure is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language, yet remains completely dynamic, every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When a mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system.

Every expression in Haskell has a type that is determined at compile time. All the types composed together by function application have to match up. If they don't, the program will be rejected by the compiler. Types become not only a form of guarantee, but a language for expressing the construction of programs. Every function in Haskell is a function in the mathematical sense (i.e., "pure"). Even side-effecting IO operations are but a description of what to do, produced by pure code. There are no statements or instructions, only expressions that cannot mutate variables (local or global) nor access state like time or random numbers. You don't have to explicitly write out every type in a Haskell program. Types will be inferred by unifying every type bidirectionally. However, you can write out types if you choose, or ask the compiler to write them for you for handy documentation.