Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey • Hacker News Board

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#11

Post by weavejester » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 7:51 PM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #6

Myself personally, I didn't find it that surprising that there were a lot of people interested in web work. I think it's self-selection; people in the web industry are far more amenable to trying new (also read as: unproven) technologies or languages. But at the same time, everyone knows Java's got some really good infrastructural libraries for web work. Since nearly everyone in the web sphere works in some sort of d…

I'm not certain that's the case. There are a lot of Java web frameworks and libraries, but many of them are orientated around static class-based designs, which don't translate well to a functional paradigm.

Most of the work I see in Clojure web development tends to keep Java at arm's length. Deploying to servlet containers is common, but beyond that I haven't seen an awful lot of overlap.

My experience might be atypical, of course.

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#12

Post by swannodette » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 7:53 PM UTC

I'm a bit sad that only few people come from a JavaScript background. My interest in Clojure arises directly from being spoiled by how hackable JavaScript is. I wanted that same level hackability but with performance and concurrency and an extra dose sanity. While I still live and breath JavaScript at work and play, JavaScript is a very crippled language by the very nature of its design (intended to run single threaded in the browser, subsequent snail's pace evolution because of this browser dependency). Clojure is a dynamic language hackers dream on so many levels - the FP stuff is often just icing!

I thoroughly recommend intermediate and advanced JavaScripters to give Clojure a good long look. You'll be blown away.

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#13

Post by dons » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 8:30 PM UTC

francoisdevlin wrote: post #9

dons wrote: post #8

I think the most compelling data here is the languages people came from: Java, Ruby, Python. And the languages they'd go to Scala, Haskell, Erlang et al. Clojure as a gateway drug on the JVM for functional programming. Cool stuff.

Gateway drug? With all due respect to Haskell, it's FP heroin.

Well, from this data it is the first functional language/drug for a significant proportion of users, so in that sense it is a gateway.

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#14

Post by marketer » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 8:30 PM UTC

Interesting data, but the comment about political polls is a bit misleading. Political polls are a random sample of a target population and are designed to avoid biases. This is a voluntary survey with plenty of response bias, so I'd keep that in mind when drawing conclusions.

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#15

Post by cemerick » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 9:04 PM UTC

weavejester wrote: post #11

KirinDave wrote: post #6

Myself personally, I didn't find it that surprising that there were a lot of people interested in web work. I think it's self-selection; people in the web industry are far more amenable to trying new (also read as: unproven) technologies or languages. But at the same time, everyone knows Java's got some really good infrastructural libraries for web work. Since nearly everyone in the web sphere works in some sort of d…

I'm not certain that's the case. There are a lot of Java web frameworks and libraries, but many of them are orientated around static class-based designs, which don't translate well to a functional paradigm. Most of the work I see in Clojure web development tends to keep Java at arm's length. Deploying to servlet containers is common, but beyond that I haven't seen an awful lot of overlap. My experience might be atypi…

Most of the work in Clojure web dev so far (that is also publicized, that is) is also oriented towards green-field projects, and not integrating with existing web frameworks. That will change, at which point Clojure will come to embrace Java warmly when necessary (e.g. witness the addition of annotation support).

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#16

Post by cemerick » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 9:06 PM UTC

marketer wrote: post #14

Interesting data, but the comment about political polls is a bit misleading. Political polls are a random sample of a target population and are designed to avoid biases. This is a voluntary survey with plenty of response bias, so I'd keep that in mind when drawing conclusions.

I was only referring to the number of respondents, not the overall methodology. But again, I disavow any expertise or sense when it comes to actual polling. :-)

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#17

Post by sreque » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 9:08 PM UTC

I respect Clojure as a language, but I'd respect the community a lot more if they didn't oversell their language and didn't trash on competing languages so often.

As an example, the only time you hear Clojure mentioned in the Scala community is when it is being complimented or porting of one of its features to Scala is being discussed. On the other hand, The only time you hear Scala mentioned in the Clojure community is when it is being derided as an inferior creation to the mighty Clojure!

Even in this article, which is supposed to be about the community's response to Clojure, the author both ignores the fact that Scala is the next most favorite language of those interviewed and also reserves a nice bullet point at the end for putting it down.

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#18

Post by cemerick » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 9:28 PM UTC

sreque wrote: post #17

I respect Clojure as a language, but I'd respect the community a lot more if they didn't oversell their language and didn't trash on competing languages so often. As an example, the only time you hear Clojure mentioned in the Scala community is when it is being complimented or porting of one of its features to Scala is being discussed. On the other hand, The only time you hear Scala mentioned in the Clojure community…

Scala is discussed frequently in Clojure circles, both positively and negatively. The former isn't fanboyism, and the latter isn't trashing -- it's talking about tradeoffs, experiences, and opinions. These things happen on the internet.

The more non-Java languages gain traction, the better the world is for Clojure programmers, so I wish the Scala community only the best. That said, I'll never hesitate to blow Clojure's horn when it has a striking advantage. I would expect nothing less in return.

Scala was mentioned positively as one of the next most favorite languages. I certainly wasn't meaning to put down Scala by including that respondent's (very, very tame IMO) comment.

Overly sensitive, perhaps? :-)

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#19

Post by snippyhollow » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 9:51 PM UTC

cemerick wrote: post #10

snippyhollow wrote: post #7

3% of "I remember when #clojure had 6 people in it" => 200 persons answered this survey.

Not sure how you get that. Check out the original data; 13 people responded "I remember when #clojure had 6 people in it" (which seems exactly right, taking timezones into account).

Ok, didn't see this "13", and I was assuming they were online h24 (seems ok to me! :D).

Re: Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

#20

Post by jkantz » Tue, Jun 08, 2010, 10:17 PM UTC

"Poor / incomprehensible error messages and stack traces are far and away the most common complaint."

I wonder if this is because of the high slime usage. The slime debugger doesn't play well with java exceptions because the stack gets unwound. JSwat is the advertised debugging option--wonder how many slime users have tried it.