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

lambdaisland.com

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

#131

Post by rockmeamedee »

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 just finished watching this talk "ClojureScript for Skeptics" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsffg5xxFQI) that laid out the pros of ClojureScript and completely sold me on trying it out. Weird seeing this article about Clojure dying right after, too.

In this talk I watched, the speaker argues for ClojureScript for SPAs because it has: * an excellent standard library (great functional programming so no need for lodash or other hacks, no issues with things like map(Integer.parse), solid date support, etc) * Go-level easy concurrency * Immutable types built-in for a fast React experience (immutable.js by default) * built-in Google Closure Compiler for optimizing, (also with sourcemaps and devtools) * built-in tree-shaking (only import what you use) from Google Closure Compiler * built-in code-splitting (don't import the code for the settings page on the home page, automatically load it when the user goes there), also from Google Closure Compiler

And the talk is from 2015! So there's probably been even more added I don't know about yet.

Then again, in 2017 I feel like we have an embarrassment of riches of programming languages. I'm already playing around with Elixir (loving it), wanna try out Rust's zero-cost everythings, and have finally finishing learning Haskell on my back burner.

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

#132

Post by kbp »

saurik wrote: post #127
kbp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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))

There's nothing preventing you from manually doing that when you type the code, but editors and pretty-printers won't know about it. Special-casing them to have "if the car of a list is cond, or this vector was preceded by let, ..., then every second element gets extra indentation if it's on a different line" vs just using the regular list formatting rules just squicks me.

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

#133

Post by j_m_b »

I really hope this isn't true, Clojure is my favorite programming language. I feel that it spoiled me. Builds are easy, code is elegant and easy to parse, functional programming combined with immutable data structures is beautiful. It also is great for "full-stack" devs in that there is little context switching between server and client.

I think the "killer app" that Clojure needs is that it should be compilable into C/C++ with the same great interop it has with Java. It would be amazing to be able to utilize all those libraries, all those frameworks, all that code... in a Clojure REPL!

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

#134

Post by j_m_b »

j_m_b wrote: post #133

I really hope this isn't true, Clojure is my favorite programming language. I feel that it spoiled me. Builds are easy, code is elegant and easy to parse, functional programming combined with immutable data structures is beautiful. It also is great for "full-stack" devs in that there is little context switching between server and client. I think the "killer app" that Clojure needs is that it should be compilable into…

Further extrapolating on this idea, it would be neat to have "one lisp to rule them all" which worked something like the LLVM where you could write a module for each language you would like to compile into and then Clojure could be the glue between all of them.

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

#135

Post by j_m_b »

j_m_b wrote: post #133

I really hope this isn't true, Clojure is my favorite programming language. I feel that it spoiled me. Builds are easy, code is elegant and easy to parse, functional programming combined with immutable data structures is beautiful. It also is great for "full-stack" devs in that there is little context switching between server and client. I think the "killer app" that Clojure needs is that it should be compilable into…

Yes, I know there is Chicken Scheme and Guile. I prefer Clojure over them though.

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

#136

Post by pweissbrod »

reality_czech wrote: post #93

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 wh…

Damnit i put my life savings on clojure stocks!!

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

#137

Post by bbsss »

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.

Immutable.js when mori.js is available? :)

Having tried both I really prefer mori, mori imports some core clojure functions with it. I found working with iterators which was recommended with immutable.js very awkward.

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

#138

Post by [deleted] »

reality_czech wrote: post #93

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 wh…

[deleted]

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

#139

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

Lisp used to be the language for AI, could Clojure possibly steal the machine learning niche back from Python?

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

#140

Post by lsdafjklsd »

shadowmint wrote: post #125
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…

> with not very nice tooling

The tooling is the best. Figwheel is hot reload that never goes down, devcards is revolutionary, and a browser repl for live in editor evaluation...

> significantly different from the existing javascript code base you already have

It actually isn't. Clojurescript is basically javascript that's immutable first, has underscore in it's core library, and then a bunch of other awesome language constructs. The libraries use the same patterns, re-frame is a nicer, more succinct abstraction over react-redux.

> poor interop to the existing js ecosystem

The interop might be the best out there. Seriously you can write javascript in clojurescript. you can straight up import es6 jsx javascript into your clojurescript code. (thanks Google Closure)

> For javascript, that crowd of alternatives is so much larger

I mean, what are the options? Clojurescript's benefits are so much more than the language. The real pluses for clojurescript are the Google Closure compiler, hot reload, browser repl, devcards, front end libraries. The language is the cherry on top. There are no alternatives that have a comparable platform not completely alien to JS developers.

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