Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

lambdaisland.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 261 posts

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#21

Post by swannodette »

virtualwhys wrote: post #7

Clojure's not dying, but it's also not thriving[1]. I think it will continue on as a solid niche language for the foreseeable future, but it's highly unlikely that the language will grow by leaps and bounds barring some must-have innovation in the Clojure language and/or ecosystem that gets the tech world to take it more seriously. There are so many options these days that it's tough to stand out from the crowd. Cloj…

I don't really have anything to say about your other points, but the only comparable compile-to-JS tech in your list to ClojureScript is Scala.js. The other options assume you don't see significant value in using the same programming idioms across client and server.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#22

Post by swannodette »

Grue3 wrote: post #19

Is Ruby supposed to be an example of "not dying" language? Because it has certainly passed its glory days as well. Also Common Lisp is better in every way ;) There's even a JVM implementation (ABCL) for people who like that sort of stuff.

I don't know but it seems to me Ruby is dying the same way anything else with 200,000+ questions on Stack Overflow is dying (i.e. it isn't).

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#23

Post by ufmace »

virtualwhys wrote: post #7

Clojure's not dying, but it's also not thriving[1]. I think it will continue on as a solid niche language for the foreseeable future, but it's highly unlikely that the language will grow by leaps and bounds barring some must-have innovation in the Clojure language and/or ecosystem that gets the tech world to take it more seriously. There are so many options these days that it's tough to stand out from the crowd. Cloj…

I'm a Rubyist and don't know much Clojure, but that sounds pretty reasonable. I'm not sure if Ruby would have taken off if it wasn't for Rails. AFAIK, Rails pushed forward a lot of new ideas in web development and really brought Ruby into the mainstream. Going by that comparison, I would think it'd be hard for Clojure to really catch on without a revolutionary framework that you need it to work with, which may be tough to pull off considering that it's all on the JVM.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#24

Post by graphememes »

bitwize wrote: post #16
graphememes wrote: post #2

I'm still left with the question of "why all the parenthesis?" While it might sound silly and reductionist, it is ostensibly the single hurdle I could never overcome when it came to lisp languages. The majority resides with the fact that it could work without them, so I see it as an ancient artifact.

Use Emacs and optionally avail yourself of a structural editing mode like paredit. Then, at a minimum, the editor will help you match parens and you barely even have to think about them. Seriously, get over your Emacs hate (if you have any) because Emacs is to Lisp family languages what IntelliJ is to Java.

I don't hate emacs, I have however invested a lot more time and work into vim than emacs so that is why I do not use it.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#25

Post by swannodette »

systems wrote: post #12

clojure's killer app, datomic, is closed source in my opinion, this is a key reason, why clojure is not thriving i can't think of any (problem) domain, where clojure have a framework or library, than is significantly better than most other frameworks or libraries if you are not number 1 at anything, it is hard to thrive

I use Datomic everyday. While it's certainly a stunning piece of technology and you could pry it from my cold dead hands, I don't think it has that much bearing on the growth of the Clojure community.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#26

Post by modularfurnitur »

I think Clojurescript might be the thing. With advances in the Google Closure compiler, it's getting better and better. And the front end developer tools and libraries in Clojurescript are _the best_ out there. The holy grail for javascript exists in Clojurescript. Until then I'll keep making my Javascript env look like Clojurescript. With janky react devcards, Immutable.js, and react-redux.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#27

Post by dragonwriter »

swannodette wrote: post #21
virtualwhys wrote: post #7

Clojure's not dying, but it's also not thriving[1]. I think it will continue on as a solid niche language for the foreseeable future, but it's highly unlikely that the language will grow by leaps and bounds barring some must-have innovation in the Clojure language and/or ecosystem that gets the tech world to take it more seriously. There are so many options these days that it's tough to stand out from the crowd. Cloj…

I don't really have anything to say about your other points, but the only comparable compile-to-JS tech in your list to ClojureScript is Scala.js. The other options assume you don't see significant value in using the same programming idioms across client and server.

While not on the list above, there are certainly others like Opal (Ruby in js)

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#28

Post by [deleted] »

swannodette wrote: post #21
virtualwhys wrote: post #7

Clojure's not dying, but it's also not thriving[1]. I think it will continue on as a solid niche language for the foreseeable future, but it's highly unlikely that the language will grow by leaps and bounds barring some must-have innovation in the Clojure language and/or ecosystem that gets the tech world to take it more seriously. There are so many options these days that it's tough to stand out from the crowd. Cloj…

I don't really have anything to say about your other points, but the only comparable compile-to-JS tech in your list to ClojureScript is Scala.js. The other options assume you don't see significant value in using the same programming idioms across client and server.

[deleted]

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#29

Post by rdtsc »

> Elm, Elixir, JavaScript, seem to be better at prioritizing the humanistic aspect. Both in the affordances of the software (Elm’s famous error messages), and in person-to-person interactions.

Can't stress that enough. I have observed Elixir community and I have to say Jose and others did an excellent job fostering a healthy, friendly and warm community. That is such an essential component. That combined with standing on a solid, reliable, battle proven platform (Erlang's BEAM VM) makes for a powerful combination. You see them interact and learn, and ask for help and you think as a new comer "Right on, I want to hang out with these people". Then you run some benchmarks, check out some docs, tutorial and think "Yeah I made the right choice".

So my recommendation if you want to build programming language community - copy what Elixir did and it will be a good start. That means both community, outreach, documentation as well a technical foundation.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#30

Post by flavio81 »

graphememes wrote: post #2

I'm still left with the question of "why all the parenthesis?" While it might sound silly and reductionist, it is ostensibly the single hurdle I could never overcome when it came to lisp languages. The majority resides with the fact that it could work without them, so I see it as an ancient artifact.

For Lisp, parentheses are a big plus. They allow the following advantages:

TL;DR: Once you start programming in Lisp for long enough, you end up loving and embracing the parentheses.

0. They allow for an extremely simple syntax, which in turn allows the source code to easily manipulate source code. No simple syntax, no really easy way to write macros. And macros are one of the most essential keys to Lisp's power. You can argue that, without extremely simple syntax, a Lisp language is not possible.

1. Syntax, being so simple, is extremely easy to learn. Yesterday i explained Lisp's syntax to a friend, in 3 minutes.

2. No need to care for special operator precedence rules. The precedence of operators is obvious by looking at the code.

3. IDEs, like SLIME, can easily traverse the code in many powerful ways. Due to this syntax, the IDEs can "understand" expressions and expressions within expressions. This means that the IDE can 'understand' any part of your code, not just big constructs like functions, methods or classes.

4. IDEs will also easily complete the parentheses for you, and will warn you of a missing parenthesis.

5. It is also dead simple to understand which parenthesis closes which one. It can be done with most source code editors -- Even a simple program like Notepad++ can do it, Visual Studio Code can do it, etc.

6. Parentheses also enable IDEs to automatically apply "pretty" format to the code rather easily.

7. As anything, you get used to it. Many people, for example, think that, in Python, whitespace as a block delimiter is a bad idea, however I never had any problem with that, it was just fine. Unless you are using Windows Notepad to edit code...

Post reply on HN