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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?

#171

Post by slowmovintarget »

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).

Emacs is awesome, but making language design decisions based on Emacs (or any editor, for that matter) seems like it ought to be at best a non-goal.

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

#172

Post by dragonwriter »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #139
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?

> Lisp used to be the language for AI

IIRC, when Lisp was a leading language for "AI", it was specifically a leading language for expert systems, not ML. Even to the extent that was due to language features being well-suited to the domain, there's still no real reason to expect that suitability to translate to the radically different approaches to AI today.

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

#173

Post by dragonwriter »

rjeli wrote: post #102
frou_dh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought the Java tie-in was a double-edged sword. For some potential Clojure users, in addition to learning the language they were interested in, they'd also have to half-learn a language (and its tooling) that they probably weren't interested in. I guess in the US there is/was an assumption that everyone coming out of the computing education system is already experienced with Java.

I can't find the quote for the of me, but it was from Rich Hickey and went something like: "First, you use Clojure to escape Java. Then, you use Clojure to write better Java." I definitely found it to be true. Clojure takes the good parts of Java's OO system.

> Clojure takes the good parts of Java's OO system.

Such as?

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

#174

Post by ali-maki »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #139
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?

https://github.com/thinktopic/cortex

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

#175

Post by discreteevent »

raspasov wrote: post #95

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.

That analogy can be used both ways!

"I'm an artist, and if you give me a tuba, I'll bring you something out of it” - John Lennon.

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

#176

Post by moomin »

bpicolo wrote: post #160
lilactown wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> The JVM just feels slow and cumbersome compared to what I'm used to (Node.js, Erlang/Elixir, Python) In what regard? Because the JVM is faster than all of the above.

It's the startup and REPL time, typically. The JVM is super-powerful when it comes to compute tasks, but define a function on the REPL and Clojure will compile it, which is necessarily slower than what Python does.

So yeah, Clojure's faster, but perception matters. Erlang's a different case because it optimises for responsiveness for small tasks. It's very hard to write Clojure or even raw Java code as good at that as an easy Erlang program.

But yeah, a Mandelbrot set will be faster in Clojure.

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

#177

Post by dasil003 »

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

Nice E2 reference. Hard to believe now, but back in the day there was serious debate about whether it should compete with the upstart Wikipedia. Glad they went the creative writing direction instead, there's some great stuff in there.

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

#178

Post by coldtea »

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…

Was it that off the mark, though?

BSD is indeed not what it used to be. Or rather, the market for UNIX (including Linux) servers expanded quite a lot, but BSD (basically FreeBSD and co) didn't rise as much.

At one point, a couple of decades back, it was more head-to-head with Linux, while no does anybody think they're even in the same order of magnitude?

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

#179

Post by _pmf_ »

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

And even if they go fully LGPL now, the perception of closedness tends to stick around. I have for years thought I'd need a license to develop commercial Qt applications and not evaluated it seriously for that reason, even though by that time it was already LGPL.

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

#180

Post by pmontra »

mirekrusin wrote: post #44
ufmace wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tou…

Rails was definitely responsible for Ruby going mainstream, without it, it would slide below Python. More than that: I think that combination of TextMate and Rails brought a huge number of web devs from Windows to MacOS as well. I remember around maybe 2005/6 people were switching from Intel based Windows to, at that time, PowerPC based Macs (transition to Intel was about to happen) just to use TextMate and Rails - i…

It has always been a pain to develop with Ruby on Windows, especially if targeting a Linux server. Gems that don't build on Windows, little help because almost everbody is on a Mac, Linux or a Linux VM on Windows. I knew many people that switched to a Mac because of that. They didn't want to manage a Linux desktop, which was more painful to do than today and with some glitches even today. I switched to Ubuntu instead and I'm still there. Emacs instead of TextMate, which was really big at the time.
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