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Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
51–60 of 307 posts
Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
#52What 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 work for one of the big "brand name" companies (I don't want to say which, but it's on the "companies using Clojure page"), and on my team we try and start all new projects to use Clojure. Frankly, I love it. After the "zen" of lisp clicked for me, Clojure gave me an OS/2-style "Better Java Than Java". Suddenly I was able to compose standard JVM library stuff in a more-natural and easy way than I could in vanilla J…
Care to mention what is the language you used in your last job that you are comparing clojure with.
Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
#53This is a bit tangential to the post, but I've seen a couple comments in this thread that amount to "Clojure is hard to read", but I think that's a really unfair comparison, because people are unwittingly comparing apples and oranges. It seems to me the reason people think Clojure is hard to read is that the language is so powerful and expressive, that when you're reading Clojure code, you're typically trying to understand the actual problem that's being solved, as opposed to just reading a bunch of code that's necessitated by the lack of power afforded by the language. For example, I can easily "read" a bunch of nested for loops in Java, but then I still have to try and understand what the actual problem is that's being solved. People seem to confuse those two things when comparing Clojure with other languages.
Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't like TIOBE, and think it's a pretty bad index, but they search for "$LANG programming", not just $LANG.
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-defi...
Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
#55I'd like to learn a modern production-ready functional language (I have some academic experience with SML), since they seem like a good way to grow as a programmer. Main contenders so far are Haskell, Scala and Clojure (Reason might go on the list soon too) - but the fact that Clojure is dynamically typed is a bit of a turn off for me. My experience with dynamic vs static typing is that as a system grows in size and complexity, the value of static typing goes up. Doing a major refactor is one of those things that I find especially error-prone in dynamic languages, while statically typed languages make this much less daunting (of course they come with the opposite issue that you might not be able to compile for a day until you've fixed all the type errors - but I'd take this trade-off any day of the week). Can anyone with experience comment whether Clojure suffers from this too or if it somehow handles the lack of static typing better than other dynamic languages?
Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
#56What 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?
It's interesting that in the current state of software development, a programming language that have been stable for not even a year might be considered obsolete.
A perennial problem in Clojure is libraries that reach a mostly "done" state tend to look inactive to outsiders, because the language is so stable there's almost no maintenance work.
So inevitably, someone will ask "Is lib foo still being used? The last commit was over 8 months ago" and then people have to chime in, "yes, it's still in heavy use".
Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
#57I'd like to learn a modern production-ready functional language (I have some academic experience with SML), since they seem like a good way to grow as a programmer. Main contenders so far are Haskell, Scala and Clojure (Reason might go on the list soon too) - but the fact that Clojure is dynamically typed is a bit of a turn off for me. My experience with dynamic vs static typing is that as a system grows in size and…
You can't refactor Clojure without fear like in Haskell. It is actually possible in Haskell now to defer type errors to runtime, but I haven't heard of a practice of using that, even to aid in refactoring.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18345672
Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
#58This is a bit tangential to the post, but I've seen a couple comments in this thread that amount to "Clojure is hard to read", but I think that's a really unfair comparison, because people are unwittingly comparing apples and oranges. It seems to me the reason people think Clojure is hard to read is that the language is so powerful and expressive, that when you're reading Clojure code, you're typically trying to unde…
Excellent points! From my personal experience I'd also like to add that there is a bit of preference involved. I find Lisp like languages much much easier on the eyes compared to Javascript or other C-like syntax. This is also partially due to the excellent support of s-expressions in editors with things like paredit [1], parinfer [2], or clever-parens [3]. With that functionality the syntax becomes nearly invisble and you're editing a /tree/ rather than characters. Coupled with autocomplete and auto-indent [e.g. 4], the code is much easier to manipulate in my experience (but again, might be preference)
[1] http://danmidwood.com/content/2014/11/21/animated-paredit.ht... (also http://emacsrocks.com/e14.html)
[2] https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/
[3] https://github.com/luxbock/evil-cleverparens (Vim with Emacs via Evil)
Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
#59Is Clojure still a thing? It seems to have fallen off my radar. Java seems resurgent after 8, even Scala seems to have lost momentum.
Yes. It's still a thing... but I do think Clojure has lost mindshare. Just some impressions: * It's natural for the development of a language to slow down after an initial period of churn. So Clojure has reached a certain level of maturity where there's less 'new cool stuff'. * There are other areas of industry where there's more 'new cool stuff' and attention naturally shifts there. * The Honeymoon period is over, a…
> I know of at least one organization looking into moving away from Clojure for the purpose of having a more attractive portfolio of assets to potential outside investors.
Out of curiosity, without naming the organization, can you elaborate on this? I don't understand what kind of portfolio you're talking about here, the codebase? Why would investors care whether it's done in $LANG? I thought they cared more about the business and business-related concerns. Maybe they perceive Clojure as being an impediment for fast delivery of features?
Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]
#60What 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've been using a full Clojure stack (front-end + backend) in production for nearly 4 years and very happy with it (6-8 people full time). But that is very much anecdotal. I guess one thing to note is that the language is very stable, there are very few (if any) breaking changes and a 4 year old library will "just work" most of the time. Even more amazing is that it's trivial to port 40 year old ideas from (Common)Lisp if you're so inclined, or interface with a known good Java implementation. To me that is a big plus, personally I wouldn't even want a ton of extra features in Clojure ... the language is fine and libraries fill in the rest. It does give the impression that not a lot of happening and that it might be fading or boring, but in a lot of settings boring is actually a good thing. The amount of times some NodeJS or Python thing changed from underneath me and I needed to rework an entire codepath or build infrastructure just because the language changed their mind on how things should be done are gladly behind me with Clojure!