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

201–210 of 261 posts

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

#201

Post by dragandj »

thom wrote: post #196
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, creat…

Incanter is not the only game in town, FYI.

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

#202

Post by Nekorosu »

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…

How much experience do you have with ClojureScript and other compiled to JS languages?

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

#204

Post by singingfish »

mamon wrote: post #200
TeMPOraL wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

ML problems are those where people benefit from the assistance of thinking more like the computer does. Python helps people think more like the computer. (corrolary: although a very similar language, Perl helps the computer think more like you do).

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

#205

Post by daxfohl »

smitherfield wrote: post #170
falcolas wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err, maybe 15 years ago, sure. 5 years ago it was the same applicants as today, only minus Go and Rust. Python and Ruby were strong in the dynamic region, Perl 6 was still an inside joke, C++ still dominated game development, Javascript was still the mainstay of web development, and so forth.

Go was around and buzzy (closer to the peak, even) 5 years ago. Apologies if I've made you feel old!

Ha, I'm definitely old. And you're right, the peak in alt-languages was closer to five years ago. Then came alt-databases. Next I think is alt-transactions (blockchain).

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

#207

Post by mtrimpe »

swannodette wrote: post #25
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

I use Datomic everyday. While it's certainly a stunning piece of technology and you could pry it from my cold dead hands, I don't think it has that much bearing on the growth of the Clojure community.

As it stands it indeed doesn't because it's closed source and not that much ends up being built around it.

Making Clojure open source but Datomic closed is, for me, still the equivalent of building a beautiful world you can wander around and explore for free forever, but whose roads and and signs all lead up to a single temple at the center, which in turn has a big sign on it saying: 'magic happens here; don't look under the covers; don't mess with it; and also... please pay.'

If that weren't the case I can only dream what people like Nikita Prokopov would be able to build and open-source around Datomic ... and the many more like him who would probably emerge from the woods if they knew their contributions could be further built upon.

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

#208

Post by AKifer »

Once modern languages like Crystal, Elixir and probably all the rest begin to allow AST manipulation, the appeal from Lisp dialects diminishes even further as like when mainstream languages began to ship with a garbage collector. Clojure like all Lisp is not dead or dying, it's not just for everyone, and that's fine.

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

#209

Post by fnord123 »

iak8god wrote: post #168
ofek wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely never.

Explain?

There is basically no foreseeable way for the state-change model of language adoption to see a palpable uptick in Clojure.

Python is easier to learn. Python is more useful for data munging/cleaning (lower startup time, loads of input libraries). Python has a repl and eval so code-as-data/data-as-code is not an advantage for Clojure as it is over C-alikes. Python FFI is almost free to call into C so end-to-end performance is better than Clojure. Python has the better libraries for ANN (TensorFlow, Theano) and ML (sklearn).

Of course, you can apply "arguably" to every statement in the previous paragraph but the evidence appears to bear it out.

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

#210

Post by dizzystar »

>> Someone asked if their were any Clojure failure stories.

Yes, unfortunately there are a few that I'm aware of. I don't want to go into detail, but I've definitely gotten more SOS calls than I care to count. I'm okay cleaning up messes, but Clojure allows developers to really hang themselves in ways that they can't in other languages simply because you can't do those things in other languages.

Clojure isn't an easy language to get, or rather, it is easy to reach for very complex, totally passing up the very simple tools the language gives you. The language is very simple, and I think that throws a lot of people, especially if they come from languages with more boilerplate baked in.

Personally, I love Clojure, but I never considered it practical for any team that is larger than a handful of developers, and it is certainly not safe for every developer to use. I'm using it on my current project because I'm working alone, and in keeping it small and focused, I have no plan to change that.

Is Clojure dying? I don't really know. I've never met enough Clojure developers that stuck with it long enough to move the meter to "massive uptick," so there isn't much of a down-slope relative to "alive." I've always seen it as a niche language with a wonderful community. I sometimes joke that I know all 50 people in the US who actually know how to use the language.

Post reply on HN