Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lambdaisland.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 261 posts

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

#191

Post by amelius »

virtualwhys wrote: post #43
swannodette wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really have anything to say about your other points, but the only comparable compile-to-JS tech in your list to ClojureScript is Scala.js. The other options assume you don't see significant value in using the same programming idioms across client and server.

The point is that most server languages these days compile to javascript. OCaml has Bucklescript, Haskell has GHCJS, Kotlin and Rust compile to JS, etc. Clojurescript and Scala.js are probably the most mature, but getting developers to make the switch when their server language is not Clojure or Scala is an uphill battle. Case in point: I find Bucklescript to be absolutely amazing (generated binaries on par with size…

Also, WASM is just around the corner, which will probably make this a non issue.

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

#192

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #178
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?

Thanks to their license model, lots of companies make use of BSD on their hardware and seldom give anything back.

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

#193

Post by retrogradeorbit »

cutler wrote: post #158
lsdafjklsd wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, front end development is light years ahead of JS. sad

Exactly. Wave goodbye to Webpack, Babel, Redux, Gulp, Grunt, Browserify, Brunch, Yeoman and the rest of the usual suspects. I'm baffled as to why Clojurescript + Leiningen isn't the preferred way. Javascript Stockholm syndrome perhaps?

It's true of everything in life. The best is never the most popular. The most popular is often, frankly, crap. Why would programming be any different?

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

#194

Post by teddyh »

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…

Please don’t troll post.

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

#195

Post by sz4kerto »

moomin wrote: post #176
bpicolo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

JVM startup time is typically sub-second. Anything above that is not the JVM, it's something else.

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

#196

Post by thom »

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?

Very unlikely. Incanter is basically dead, so I don't think Clojure is one of the go-to numerical computing platforms. Therefore I just don't see it getting the mind-share required to thrive for these sorts of applications.

Besides, at the technical level AI in the age of Lisp was a very different beast than AI today. If you take Eurisko to be the apex of Lisp-based AI, it benefited from code-as-data, dynamism, creating and mutating more or less human digestible heuristics on the fly. AI today is linear algebra. Clojure/Java have perfectly good linear algebra libraries but there's nothing about the language that specifically lends itself to solving these problems. I'd certainly love to see a nicely done deep learning library in Clojure using lots of macros to give a succinct, and it probably even exists, but there are no fundamental advantages over Python.

I've always felt some sadness that Clojure presented an extremely sensible way of programming in a multicore world, just as distributed and GPU computing began to take over for really heavy workloads. Personally I love the immutability anyway, and there's no denying those extra cores are _there_.

Anyway, I love Clojure and it'd be great not to have to use Python (and especially R), but it's just not realistic.

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

#197

Post by shadowmint »

lsdafjklsd wrote: post #140
shadowmint wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The tooling is the best.

No, it's really not.

Have you tried other ecosystems? You should. If clojure is the best tooling you've ever used, look around, there's a wide world out there.

Heck, even the article linked above from lambdaisland lists tooling as one of the issues clojure suffers with.

> I mean, what are the options?

Haxe. Dart. Typescript. Elm. Scala. LivesSript. ES6. CoffeeScript. Flow. PureScript. ...

There must be what, 50 odd listed on https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu...

...but I mean, even if we accept that the things you say about clojurescript are true (and I don't agree that they are, but even if I did), the point I'm making is that it doesnt stand out from the crowd in terms of features.

Nothing you've described is something that would be missed particularly using say, typescript, webpack and npm.

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

#198

Post by ramchip »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #182
lilactown wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erlang/Elixir also is immutable & persistent by default.

It is immutable and persistent, but not with the same performance characteristics. It lacks Bagwell's data structures that allow structural sharing. Take a 10 million item list in elixir and 'change' (return a new) the 5 millionth element. Time how long it takes. Do the same with clojure. Compare.

That was true a few years ago, but not anymore: https://medium.com/@jlouis666/breaking-erlang-maps-1-31952b8...

(You would have to use a map though, the native lists are still plain old lists)

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

#199

Post by winteriscoming »

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…

This post is like reading a CNN kind of site which posts latest "what we know so far" every few minutes about some breaking news :)

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

#200

Post by mamon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #186
dragonwriter wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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…

Python is well suited for ML, just not in technical sense:

it is a very simple language that's easy to use by people who have a strong academic background, but not much of programming experience (AKA: Data Scientists). Also it has a lot of numerical libraries (numpy, pandas)

Post reply on HN