Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by dragandj » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:10 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #79

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 tried Clojure and literally within the first hour got a super ugly Java stack trace from trying to add two numbers, and that was after already being a bit miffed by JVM startup time (i'm very big on instant unit test feedback). Meh.

In Clojure, you do not need (and should not) restart JVM to run unit tests. You evaluate them (manually or automatically, from the prompt or a file) inside your REPL.

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

#92

Post by city41 » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:10 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #66

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.

Contrast, for a moment: var x = fib(a, b); with (let x (fib a b)) And count the delimiting symbols. I count 5 in the first example. In the second, I see 4. Let's try something a bit harder. function(a, b) { return a * b; }(6, 4); vs. ((fn (a b) (* a b) ) 6 4) 10 first, 8 second. Yes, "why all the [symbols]" indeed.

Quantity is only one aspect. Structure and ability to mentally parse out patterns matters too. I don't mind Lisps and use Clojure regularly, yet I'd still argue your JS examples are easier to read than the Lisp ones.

Heck even Clojure seems to agree, just the simple act of using vectors for various things (ie function parameters) helps with the readability

    ((fn [a b]
        (* a b)
    ) 6 4)

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

#93

Post by reality_czech » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:16 PM UTC

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Clojure is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Clojure community when Lambda Island confirmed that Clojure market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all new code. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Clojure has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Clojure is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent comprehensive programming languages survey.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Clojure's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Clojure faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Clojure because Clojure is dying. Things are looking very bad for Clojure As many of us are already aware, Clojure continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Due to the troubles of Lisp, abysmal sales and so on, Lisp Machines went out of business and was taken over by GigaMos Systems, who sold another troubled Lisp. Now GigaMos is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Clojure has steadily declined in market share. Clojure is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Clojure is to survive at all it will be among programming language dilettante dabblers. Clojure continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Clojure is dead.

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

#94

Post by raspasov » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:21 PM UTC

saosebastiao wrote: post #88

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.

I don't know. Javascript is pretty slow as it is, and clojurescript is even slower. There is an inherent problem with compiling a dynamic typed language to another dynamic typed language...if your target language doesn't have the same semantics as your source, you end up having to embed a bunch of runtime code into your compiled output, or sacrifice compatibility. [0] With a strong statically typed language like scal…

JavaScript slow? Compared to what? ClojureScript is within 10-20% of JavaScript or less (virtually the same).

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

#95

Post by raspasov » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:22 PM UTC

Clojure is a tool for people who know their doing by people who know their doing.

Just like a fine Stradivarius violin. For me the violin would be indistinguishable from an entry level violin but for the master it's a very powerful tool.

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

#96

Post by phs2501 » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:28 PM UTC

Oddly, as someone who was reasonably into Common Lisp, what really viscerally turned me off to Clojure was the use of square brackets.

This sounds petty but I actually have some rationalization for it. Once you learn to read Lisp (mostly looking at the indentation and ignoring the parens) it's really nice that there's only one kind of delimiter in the language. It allows a lot of easy structure editing with a decent editor. I had emacs set up to use the unshifted square bracket keys to create and exit balanced parenthesis pairs. Once you got used to this, this was really pleasant to write and mutate code.

As soon as I saw Clojure, I knew that my setup would unavoidably get twice as complicated because they added another delimiter that's used in random places in the code. (Why are function arguments a vector instead of a list? Just because the designer thinks it looks better? Why are let bindings a vector? Why are ordinary function calls and function bodies a list? It just feels arbitrary.) That in and of itself really turned me off. (The fact that it's the JVM really didn't help either, but that was actually secondary to the above.)

Other issues for me were the lack of two layers in the LET statement (i.e. it's (let [a 1 b 2] ...) rather than (let ((a 1) (b 2)) ...). To some that probably "looks better" but it kills the ability to use emacs's transpose-sexps to swap the order of your let bindings around.

All in all the syntax just didn't seem well thought out to me. OTOH to non-lispers it probably looked better, so maybe that was the goal.

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

#97

Post by wand3r » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:29 PM UTC

city41 wrote: post #89

wand3r wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be room in the market for trendy, abstracted languages like Assembly that provide simple syntax and garbage collection to sort memory management. Sometimes I think it's too user friendly though: assembly new project When you scaffold an app like this in assembly you hardly know what it's doing under the hood.

I thought programminggeek was making a joke. There's a high level language called Assembly? If so, it's 100% unsearchable. Or are you joking too? Got any links?

I think they were serious. I was certainly joking.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:32 PM UTC

phs2501 wrote: post #96

Oddly, as someone who was reasonably into Common Lisp, what really viscerally turned me off to Clojure was the use of square brackets. This sounds petty but I actually have some rationalization for it. Once you learn to read Lisp (mostly looking at the indentation and ignoring the parens) it's really nice that there's only one kind of delimiter in the language. It allows a lot of easy structure editing with a decent…

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by flavio81 » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:36 PM UTC

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.

SLIME (for Emacs) is wonderful. I like Emacs, what i don't like is the key combinations, which are horrible.

Fortunately, you can redefine them. Emacs can be customized at will, and using Lisp :)

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

#100

Post by outworlder » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:37 PM UTC

So, a keynote on conference about a dying language has mentioned that another, unrelated language is dying. And people are taking notice.

It does not make sense.