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My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

ashtonkemerling.com

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Re: My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

#41

Post by daxfohl »

agumonkey wrote: post #16
lkrubner wrote: post #13

I love Clojure, and I use it in every project where I have control over the technology, but I do agree with the points raised by Ashton Kemerling. Clojure is beautiful, and backed by beautiful theories, but its implementation needs to be clean or it will eventually develop enough special cases that its beauty will be ruined. In some sense, you could say this is what happened to Ruby, though there the allowance of "sp…

I kinda despise non dogfooding projects. Like realizing that IBM rarely ever uses it's own modeling tools and principles to develop internal or commercial software (at least arount that time). And yes I liked lisp because of its underlying beauty. Scheme did one step further. It reuses itself in many ways. That clojure implementation isn't leveraging it's own quality feels unlispy but alas... it's also a huge effort…

Well there's a difference between dogfooding and self-hosting. The Clojure team uses Clojure all the time. They just don't use all aspects of Clojure on Clojure itself.

For quite some time golang specifically set self-hosting as a non-goal. The rationale was that C beat go in many areas that were important to compilers (raw speed, I would guess, initially). It's only recently that they started self-hosting.

So just because you can self-host doesn't mean you should. The benefits have to outweigh the cons. Like any project, choose the best language for the job. That said, I have no idea whether the Clojure system would be better off using more of its own features or not.

Re: My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

#42

Post by [deleted] »

dustingetz wrote: post #39
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting down voted; probably because the way you worded your question. I'm giving you an up, because I, too, am very curious how something is possible only in Clojure and nothing else.

This is one architecture that is made possible by clojure: http://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow To build it outside of clojure ecosystem, you would need to first build all the pieces of the clojure ecosystem

[deleted]

Re: My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

#43

Post by _halgari »

wmccullough wrote: post #33
dustingetz wrote: post #20

I think this article is spot on. But. I think the root cause here is that many of the tools are build by the community. Great tools cost a lot of money to build, and you need to build the right thing at the right time, the cost needs to be spread across the comminuty. The community is growing and tools are improving. The first generation tools with all their rough edges are being replaced by simpler tools that have i…

I couldn't agree with you more. I've been wanting to learn Clojure for years now, but I'm not going to fight with an IDE for hours to do so.

Install IntelliJ install cursive. Done.

Have a friend who as learning to program. He got Cursive going in less than 30min

Re: My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

#44

Post by Retra »

eric_h wrote: post #27

> The thing I am trying to build is not possible in any other ecosystem today Umm... what? I'm afraid I don't understand how the "grand vision" behind Clojure adds pixie dust that makes it capable of something another Turing complete language isn't. Care to elaborate?

Turing completeness says nothing about your ability to operate within time constraints.

Re: My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

#45

Post by catnaroek »

lkrubner wrote: post #13

I love Clojure, and I use it in every project where I have control over the technology, but I do agree with the points raised by Ashton Kemerling. Clojure is beautiful, and backed by beautiful theories, but its implementation needs to be clean or it will eventually develop enough special cases that its beauty will be ruined. In some sense, you could say this is what happened to Ruby, though there the allowance of "sp…

I don't see what Ruby's “beautiful philosophy” is. Here are some examples of philosophies I actually consider beautiful, regardless of the result they led to:

(0) Lisp, Scheme, Forth: “A small extensible core language beats a fixed large language.” (While Common Lisp is actually pretty large, there's a rather small subset of it from which the rest can be built.)

(1) ML, Haskell: “Let's see how much we can do using types as our primary abstraction enforcement mechanism.”

(2) C++, Rust: “Abstraction isn't at odds with efficiency and fine-grained control.” (Runtime enforcement is, though.)

What does Ruby have to offer? Matsumoto claims to prioritize “developer happiness”, but allowing arbitrary modifications to arbitrary parts of any program doesn't make everyone happy. And, even if it did, “developer happiness” isn't a technical criterion anyway.

Re: My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

#46

Post by daxfohl »

Odd, in two years I've never been bit by a single one of these bugs. And if I had, I could probably pretty easily shrug them off.

My frustration came from the lack of a type system, and that there's no "myThing." (myThing-dot) to give you intellisense. Even many dynamic language editors have some variant of this now. So coding in Clojure involves too much looking stuff up and memorizing stuff, and is way slower than it should be in 2016.

Re: My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

#47

Post by maherbeg »

awwaiid wrote: post #7
vimota wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say he backs up his claims quite well, unlike your comment. He gave ample evidence at his frustrations with the progress of the language - what did you find annoying about it?

I see a lot of issues but not a lot of PRs. As a maintainer there is a lot of prioritization going on, and it seems that the things that bother the blog author are not things that bother the maintainers. I also agree with some of the replies on the issues - garbage in garbage out for a function is ok behavior. One of the cool things about clojure and other languages like this is that these things can often be fixed a…

I strongly disagree with garbage in, garbage out. We as programmers and engineers should strive for better tooling in all aspects. I firmly believe that reducing footguns and making our tooling help nudge us in the right direction are extremely important qualities.

Re: My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

#50

Post by masklinn »

dilap wrote: post #38
nidu wrote: post #9

Once I tried to make a union of a sorted set and an unsorted one. Result set inherits behaviour of a bigger input set so when i first got my sometimes-sorted set i thought like loosing my mind.

Avoiding madness like this is why I have come to really prefer statically typed languages.

The issue doesn't have much to do with dynamic typing, any subtyping support can trigger it. Take Java, if Set had a `Set union(Collection)` method a SortedSet could return a new SortedSet (cast as a set, but still with the actual behaviour of a sorted set).
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