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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?

#121

Post by kbp »

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…

I agree, the decrease in editor-friendliness is really frustrating, coming from Lisp. The lack of parens around cond clauses is also annoying to me, because it makes it so that you can't really insert a newline after a predicate for legibility, since it makes the then-part flush with the other predicates (and similarly for let bindings).

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

#122

Post by throwaway7645 »

weaksauce wrote: post #11
protomyth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because significant white space (e.g. Python) has quite a lot of detractors of its own.

I absolutely cannot stand significant whitespace... it is a step back in almost every area of usability.

I love both Lisp & Python. I'm not sure about large projects, but to me, nothing is easier to read than Python and a lot of people agree. It is so strict and authoritarian that nearly everyone ends up writing similar code. Good for sharing scripts on my team. If I write Perl, only I can understand it...and even that is temporary lol (I joke, but you get the point).

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

#123

Post by moxious »

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…

It's not really clear to me why, but lisps keep trying and keep dying. Best guess is that in the end, syntax really does matter and lisp just doesn't have enough of it.

Whether it's scheme or clojure or arc, every once in a while a new lisp comes along, and they never make it. This through decades and generations of programmers.

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

#124

Post by throwaway7645 »

graphememes wrote: post #24
bitwize wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea...I like the theory of emacs, but the reality of vim usage.

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

#125

Post by shadowmint »

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 hear this a lot from the clojure community... but I think it's a missed attempt to pivot off the JVM and have clojure be useful for more people on a more popular platform.

Missed?

Yes.

Pick a thing.

Be excellent at it.

What is clojurescript excellent at?

Its a nice language, with not very nice tooling, that is hard to maintain and significantly different from the existing javascript code base you already have, with poor interop to the existing js ecosystem (it is poor, compared to some other compile to js languages).

On the JVM, java sucks, but your choices are limited; what, maybe groovy, kotlin, scale, clojure?

Clojure has pride of place as the best dynamic language in that space.

For javascript, that crowd of alternatives is so much larger, clojurescript needs to actually be good to stand out amongst all the others.

...and I don't think it really does.

The people who use it seem to just like it as a language; and I get that, that's a thing.

...but aesthetics are personal preference and its difficult to ague they make a compelling use case.

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

#127

Post by saurik »

kbp wrote: post #121
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…

I agree, the decrease in editor-friendliness is really frustrating, coming from Lisp. The lack of parens around cond clauses is also annoying to me, because it makes it so that you can't really insert a newline after a predicate for legibility, since it makes the then-part flush with the other predicates (and similarly for let bindings).

I don't understand: why can't you add a newsline andan indent?

    (cond
      (whatever)
        (thing)
      (something)
        (more))

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

#128

Post by _halgari »

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…

What's interesting is that for me Clojure was my first lisp. One of the main reasons I never learned lisp before Clojure was all the parens that made the language impossible to read. Clojure cleans up the "normal" lisp syntax quite a bit, and that made it a lot more palatable.

Beauty is in the eye, and all that, but CL code still makes me want to claw my eyes out.

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

#129

Post by saurik »

phs2501 wrote: post #117
dragandj wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the second point, why didn't you just define your own let macro? As a Java->Clojure guy I find better readability of Clojure's let compared to CL's support of transpose an acceptable tradeoff, but the point of being a lisp is that you are not constrained by all decisions of the boss?

Well yes, in theory, but it's generally considered in somewhat bad taste to replace fundamental basics of the language. At that point you're not really writing Clojure anymore, it's hard to read other people's code, it's hard for other people to read your code, etc. See the somewhat controversial Allegro CL IF* macro for an example of this (I think that's what it was called; turns out that's really hard to search for…

Using an entirely different language because you don't want to use the macro features of the language you are using to modify a small detail due to it feeling "a bit gauche" seems much more extreme to me than just making that change... FWIW, I work with an old-school Lisp/Scheme hacker who learned at MIT and worked with some of "the greats", and he has often argued that if I really wanted Lisp to look like anything I said I liked that day I should have just done that with Lisp as at least then we would be using the same underlying execution engine, and he never seemed to feel it was "a bit gauche".

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

#130

Post by sanderjd »

voltagex_ wrote: post #112
sanderjd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an ironic homage to some piece of alarmist writing about something else? If not, it seems way over the top. It was pretty fun to read though.

I feel old now: https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying

This is great! Thanks for educating me :-)
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