My Increasing Frustration with Clojure

Post by blain_the_train » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 11:15 PM UTC

todd8 wrote: post #147

blain_the_train wrote: post #76

> And the namespace is completely riddled with bugs. union returns duplicates if some of the inputs are lists instead of sets depending on their length. to be clear I assume he is taking about this: ``` try-spec.core=> (clojure.set/union [1,2] [1,2]) [1 2 1 2] ``` Though im not sure what "depending on their length means". > for the above bugs there are two possible fixes: raise an IllegalArgumentException if anything…

I'm a bit confused by your example. Python has different design goals than Clojure. Clojure competes with rather high performance languages, Java and Scala, on the JVM and it appears from the OP that its implementors have decided that it can't afford to spend too much time at run-time checking. Python on the other hand at least attempts to adhere to a principle of least surprise and enforces strong type requirements…

   In [19]: s = set([1, 2, 3])

   In [20]: s.union({"x", "y"})
   Out[20]: {1, 2, 3, 'y', 'x'}

Post by eric_h » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 11:34 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #154

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?

This is the sort of generic programming language flamewar comment we can do without. If you want to discuss questions like this on HN, please pose them without snark. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11883875 and marked it off-topic.

Post by puredanger » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 11:42 PM UTC

lawpoop wrote: post #52

_halgari wrote: post #35

Something that is often very hard to understand (it took me years to do so). Is that maintaining a language is insanely hard. Everything has a cost. Let me give a good example: A few years back someone submitted a patch that improved the error messages in Clojure. Worked great, just a single extra "if" and a message. It was committed to master. Then people's code got way slower. Why? Well this was a often used functi…

Sounds like there might be a potential for a dev and production codebase?

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 11:53 PM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #120

I'm a big fan of Clojure and have been since 2009. I'm such a big fan that I run the local Clojure meetup. I do think that Cognitects interaction with the community could be friendlier in terms of bug reports and community patches. They have a bit of a history of not communicating what they're doing (for example, the Zach Tellman thing someone else mentioned). I don't think they need to change much to fix this, they…

Post by jdc » Sat, Jun 11, 2016, 11:53 PM UTC

puredanger wrote: post #164

pmarreck wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why couldn't they simply include the extra debug code and use that config for Clojure compiles?

We general try to assume that the user has applied no special JVM options. Planning with that as a baseline is much better than requiring people supply a big soup of options.