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

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

#51

Post by eriknstr »

rdtsc wrote: post #29

> 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 standin…

I feel that Rich Hickey alone makes the Clojure community very healthy, friendly and warm. The JVM is solid, reliable and battle proven, is it not?

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

#52

Post by mirekrusin »

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.

Funnily enough Ruby is doing not too bad - according to contributions [1] it's at stable speed since 2008 (!) without any slowdown. Similarly Rails [2] looks like healthy, steady project.

Ruby/Rails, for rapid prototyping [3] with minimal friction [4] it's still, after years, considered by many, as the best tool for the job.

[1] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/graphs/contributors

[2] https://github.com/rails/rails/graphs/contributors

[3] rapid prototypes land as production systems - that's a pro tip.

[4] minimal friction on all levels that you, as a programer care - from reading and writing code, scaffolding, dev/staging/production deployment, database migrations, testing to caching etc. - not many setups give you all of this.

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

#53

Post by jbeja »

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.

There is no value indeed. Why would you the same languages for a domain it doesn't fit?

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

#54

Post by jbeja »

ubercow wrote: post #49

Clojure's "killer feature" for me is the by-default persistent data structures. Are there any other functional languages out there with similar features? Lisp or otherwise.

Any mainstream functional language at this point. The data structures are not closed.

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

#55

Post by runT1ME »

ubercow wrote: post #49

Clojure's "killer feature" for me is the by-default persistent data structures. Are there any other functional languages out there with similar features? Lisp or otherwise.

Scala has a collections library that heavily emphasizes immutable/persistent data sructures. You aren't forces to use them but it is idiomatic Scala to be "pure"/non mutating.

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

#56

Post by stretchwithme »

eriknstr wrote: post #51
rdtsc wrote: post #29

> 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 standin…

I feel that Rich Hickey alone makes the Clojure community very healthy, friendly and warm. The JVM is solid, reliable and battle proven, is it not?

He gave the Simplicity Matters talks at Railsconf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0) and opened my eyes to a lot of important issues. He's accessible yet challenging.

It didn't make me want to do Clojure, but I definitely wanted to fully understand the message.

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

#57

Post by ledgerdev »

philbo wrote: post #48
ledgerdev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I suspect one current thing hurting adoption from the JS community is the very heavy JVM based tooling. With the Google Closure compiler now running on top of JS, there would seem to be a path for the CLJS(not clj) tooling to become more JS ecosystem friendly. For the JS developers out there, is this something that's of interest? Or is the existing tooling(lein) good enough? What would be your ideal tooling s…

As a JS programmer with some Clojure experience I can confirm that the JVM is absolutely the biggest turn-off for me personally. Lisp syntax, immutable data structures, laziness, all splendid. The build/runtime environment, not so much. Sounds like I should revisit CLJS based on your comment.

Well at the moment, the tooling is all lein/JVM based.

That said, Figwheel hooked up with atom+protorepl+parinfer is pretty amazing if you haven't tried it.

https://github.com/bhauman/lein-figwheel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WMga5E7Vsk

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

#58

Post by lilactown »

modularfurnitur wrote: post #26

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.

As someone who writes JavaScript for a living (among bits of Java and Swift), I'm loving ClojureScript. I'm currently building a side project with it. But I am still a bit skittish of Clojure (JVM). The JVM just feels slow and cumbersome compared to what I'm used to (Node.js, Erlang/Elixir, Python). The lack of good error messages is manageable when combined with figwheel on the CLJS side, but there doesn't seem to be something comparable on the server side.

I feel like Clojure needs a really good use case or story to have it become more popular. It feels really nice to program in, it's just that for specific needs - native UI programming, CLI apps, concurrent programming, data processing, web programming - other languages are better in those areas, and are good enough in other areas, that Clojure just doesn't seem compelling.

I think that Elixir's (which is really the same story as Ruby's) success is worth looking at. Elixir is really cool, but it's main hype train really doesn't have anything to do with it's technical strengths (concurrent programming) - it just has a really compelling web development story through Phoenix.

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