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Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

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Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#31
post #3

What happened to Clojure? Was it just a fad, or are people still using it in their day jobs? Are people still hiring Clojure devs? If you write Clojure at work, are you happy with it?

We're still using Clojure at Factual and are hiring. https://www.factual.com/company/careers/?gh_src=1pt2v8

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#32
post #16
post #3

What happened to Clojure? Was it just a fad, or are people still using it in their day jobs? Are people still hiring Clojure devs? If you write Clojure at work, are you happy with it?

While other posters comment that "Clojure still works", IIRC the "promise" was that Clojure/Lisp would be much, much more productive , and that claim I feel like must been disproved in daily work, otherwise Clojure would still a main topic around here. Reminds me of the classic Erann Gatt post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2308370 (I loved to play with Elisp, Clojure, Lua, Factor, Ion, Ioke and hope dynamic l…

I can only speak for myself, but I'm definitely much, much more productive using Clojure. I think its absence from HN is more reflective of a less-than-stellar onboarding experience for newcomers, and HN's general neophilia.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#33
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barely hanging onto the top 50 at #49 according to the TIOBE index (Java is still #1). Make of that what you will. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

That index lists Ladder Logic (#45) as being ahead of Bash (#48). Make of that what you will.

well... yeah ? there are entire companies of thousand of electrical engineers working in LL. They just don't come and post about it to hackernews and make PLC projects in github, they do their 9-5 job and that's all.

Compare https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=PLC+engineer and https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=bash+programmer

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#34
post #3

What happened to Clojure? Was it just a fad, or are people still using it in their day jobs? Are people still hiring Clojure devs? If you write Clojure at work, are you happy with it?

Clojure use has been growing steadily, and lots of companies are hiring. In a recent JVM survery of 10K people Clojure came in as the second most used language after Java https://snyk.io/blog/jvm-ecosystem-report-2018

My team has been working with Clojure for the past 8 years, and we're extremely happy with it.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#35
post #3

What happened to Clojure? Was it just a fad, or are people still using it in their day jobs? Are people still hiring Clojure devs? If you write Clojure at work, are you happy with it?

CircleCI uses ClojureScript last I read.

think they stopped: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/9ho97m/is_circleci...

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#36
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barely hanging onto the top 50 at #49 according to the TIOBE index (Java is still #1). Make of that what you will. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

That index lists Ladder Logic (#45) as being ahead of Bash (#48). Make of that what you will.

That's because TIOBE derives metrics from search results. Which means every time some one searches 'Python, the snake', that also gets counted as 'Python, the programming language'.

Most people looking for help on the internet are searching:

"How do I do X in shell?"

No of people looking for help with the word 'Bash' are likely to be lower.

That's one reason why TIOBE is sometimes way off the real trends.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#37
post #30
post #3

What happened to Clojure? Was it just a fad, or are people still using it in their day jobs? Are people still hiring Clojure devs? If you write Clojure at work, are you happy with it?

The cancellation of a few major Clojure conferances hasn’t helped. I’m guessing it speaks to demand. I used Clojure for a long time, professionally. Not much any more. Main issue is that the language is not very readable (a pain point mentioned in these slides) and very hard to find people to work in it. Also more than any other language Clojure is very sensitive to typos in your code. A misspelled keyword results in…

>>A misspelled keyword results in nil accidentally flowing through your app.

Some dynamic languages, worked around this issue in the 90's. Perl for example, if you use 'use strict; use warnings' will catch most of these misadventures.

Having said that, only the most novice programmers make these kind of mistakes. Like the absolute beginners, in the first day or two of exposure to programming.

As a rule almost any shop these days write unit test cases, so that should flush out these kind of bugs.

EDIT: Why the downvotes? People seriously work with programmers whose biggest incompetence at work is typos? Or you think writing unit test cases is bad?

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#38
post #16
post #3

What happened to Clojure? Was it just a fad, or are people still using it in their day jobs? Are people still hiring Clojure devs? If you write Clojure at work, are you happy with it?

While other posters comment that "Clojure still works", IIRC the "promise" was that Clojure/Lisp would be much, much more productive , and that claim I feel like must been disproved in daily work, otherwise Clojure would still a main topic around here. Reminds me of the classic Erann Gatt post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2308370 (I loved to play with Elisp, Clojure, Lua, Factor, Ion, Ioke and hope dynamic l…

I think individual developers are most likely to become much, much more productive when using Clojure/Lisp vs. Java, C#, and the like, but software development teams are unlikely to experience the same benefits.

And it's not even because Clojure is bad for teams, it's because teams often form because there are nontechnical stakeholders, and suddenly an individual contributor's code-writing productivity is a much smaller factor when compared to the communication practices and other parts of the development process outside of writing code.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#39
post #3

What happened to Clojure? Was it just a fad, or are people still using it in their day jobs? Are people still hiring Clojure devs? If you write Clojure at work, are you happy with it?

I regularly use Clojure at work, even though I am usually a sole contributor because other people are not willing to use anything other than Python, Go, Java. The primitives for doing concurrent and parallel programming is just so nice that I can't think of living without it. Go has similar solutions though. The biggest advantage is to have a concise small code base that does exactly you want without dancing around language related boilerplate.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#40
post #30
post #3

What happened to Clojure? Was it just a fad, or are people still using it in their day jobs? Are people still hiring Clojure devs? If you write Clojure at work, are you happy with it?

The cancellation of a few major Clojure conferances hasn’t helped. I’m guessing it speaks to demand. I used Clojure for a long time, professionally. Not much any more. Main issue is that the language is not very readable (a pain point mentioned in these slides) and very hard to find people to work in it. Also more than any other language Clojure is very sensitive to typos in your code. A misspelled keyword results in…

Also the Clojure language had a huge growth period around 1.1-1.5 which sparked a lot of excitement and spurred a lot of community growth. But since then, most of the exciting features have been adapted to other mainstream languages either as features or libraries, and most senior developers I know prefer to take the path of least resistance, which includes avoiding less-mainstream languages and frameworks. So instead of using Clojure with Compojure, it's common to move to Java with Dropwizard, or slightly less analogous, JavaScript with Express.js. And instead of using ClojureScript with Om, people mostly jumped to JavaScript + React.

Edit: Removed comment about Om, since I must be misremembering something. Om uses React and has since the first commit.

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