181–190 of 261 posts
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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.
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.
Erlang/Elixir also is immutable & persistent by default.
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> 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 a…
That's why JRuby is still a niche and most developers keep using MRI despite JRuby being eventually faster. It's a different example of developer happiness.
I love Clojure, am more productive in it than any other language (and I've done a lot in my time, including the other FP languages mentioned in this thread) but I have to concede that most people will just not like it or get it. And that's fine by me.
I also like alternative music. Most people will never like it. Most people like mainstream pop. This is also fine by me.
Oh and I certainly would never go back to a mutable-by-default language like Ruby. I mean if it works for you, do it. But I think you are crazy.
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.
In all seriousness, I think that package managers play a big role in the success of modern languages, espcially if the package managers are there from the beginning. As far as I'm aware Clojure was the only attempt at a LISP where a package manager was included from the beginning.
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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.
People these days use Python for ML, which is even less suited for the domain (and lacks the ability to re-suite itself), not to mention being significantly less performant than popular Common Lisp implementation.
Our industry is strange :).
A bit more seriously (which does not mean than anything in the previous paragraph is less true) the Java ecosystem has been grossly oversold from the very beginning, and even Rich himself has been converted (I still remember how I spat when I listened to his praise for Java as the best target platform in his very first marketing videos).
Clojure has been very well positioned and cleverly promoted (basically bringing decades of research by very bright people culminating in the Common Lisp to the Java Land of packers) but there was (and is) no demand for it and very few of those who could understand and appreciate the principles and ideas on which it has been founded.
It is dying for the very same reasons that the Common Lisp is still dying - The Worse Is Better or Idiots, Idiots Everywhere.
No one really needs a perfection (approaching perfection) of the great languages. The popular crap to get shit done for a paycheck (Java, Javascript, Ruby you name it) is what is in demand.
But this is rather a common pattern. This is exactly how the Upanishadic philosophy has been degraded into cryptic meaningless tantras, how Buddhism has been transformed into debased Lamaism, how western philosophy ended up with Hegelian nonsense and Marxism or what a sophisticated noise we have instead of Bach. The very same pattern. The world is dominated by idiots and will always be.
It sounds horrific but you are not bound by oath and vow to the framework you love. You must not jump ship, you can ride two or three, depending on where your money comes from.
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Lisp used to be the language for AI, could Clojure possibly steal the machine learning niche back from Python?
Lisp was invented to produce AI. Machine learning is a better way to produce AI. So in a sense, Machine learning takes the needs for Lisp (in AI) away.
ML takes the needs for Lisp more-less in the same way Entity-Component-System architecture takes the needs for C++ and C# programmers...
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.