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Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

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Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#91

Post by rubber_duck »

projectileboy wrote: post #53

This 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…

Not my experience - for eg. I remember reading trough implementation of a clojure standard lib core.async (this was years ago) https://github.com/clojure/core.async/blob/master/src/main/c...

It took me a long time to figure out what's going on in that code - I remember realizing how it would have been much simpler to read in a popular statically typed language like C#, types are a lot like compiler verified documentation and in undocumented code they help a lot. To be fair this is not the norm - I've seen many cases where Clojure removed incredible amounts of boilerplate and made reading the code straightforward, and the nicest thing about it was that it made simple things simple.

I haven't worked with Clojure in couple of years, the reason I left it is because I felt it wouldn't scale well in the real world (in terms of developers and teams) but it really helped me "get" LISP and FP so I don't regreat learning it

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#92

Post by 200px »

kamaal wrote: post #74
tome wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if people have problems, as bad as things like hiring programmers who struggle with indenting code, making typos in variable names Those are the kind of things that the computer is best suited to. It's better if the programmer's brain is left to other, more challenging tasks.

One wonders what kind of challenging tasks a programmer who can't even indent code, can solve. By the way indenting code happens to be the most basic of code review checks.

Code indentation has been automated away since like 10 years or ago or maybe even more.

Vim, Emacs, Atom, Sublime Text, Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans can all auto-indent code for you. Combined with linters they can also automate stylistic checks and coding convention.

I don't know anyone who indents code themselves. The editor/IDE does it for them.

Indenting code is certainly not a code review check. No sane workplace should waste a senior developer's precious time commenting about indentation problems during code reviews. It is a tooling check that is part of CI/CD.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#93

Post by shadowmint »

diab0lic wrote: post #63
codetrotter wrote: post #6

Would be interested to hear their experiences with Clojure at Netflix for the 5 years that have followed since then. Did they keep writing more Clojure? If so, how much of their code is now in Clojure compared to Java? How much more did they rewrite from Java to Clojure? Do they use Clojure rather than Java for new code? What other languages do they use? Python? Erlang? Rust? How much, in terms of functionality, is w…

I am very glad you asked! I wrote and deployed (to production) some Clojure code at Netflix just yesterday. Among other things at Netflix the Mantis Query Language (MQL an SQL for streaming data) which ferries around approximately 2 trillion events every day for operational analysis (SPS alerting, quality of experience metrics, debugging production, etc) is written entirely in Clojure. This runs in nearly every criti…

Thats an interesting point that doesn’t answer any of the questions the parent asked. :)

Perhaps you can answer this simpler one:

Netflix has been using clojure for a long time now; has that been a positive experience broadly speaking, that means clojure is still being used for new projects, or not?

Having a large successful project in clojure is lovely, but much of the community’s concern around it is that its hard to maintain, and falling in popularity, broadly speaking.

It would be very nice indeed to see those points addressed by a large scale user of clojure.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#94

Post by 200px »

kamaal wrote: post #36
yen223 wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

> Which means every time some one searches 'Python, the snake', that also gets counted as 'Python, the programming language'.

This is false.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#95

Post by jb3689 »

udfalkso wrote: post #88
m12k wrote: post #55

I'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…

Another option worth considering is Elixir. It's also dynamically typed, but the pattern matching helps mitigate dynamic type issues if used correctly. It's a pleasure to work with.

I love Elixir but it's worth noting that I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it for every project because of the performance and base OS integration characteristics of the BEAM. The BEAM is a truly amazing piece of software and I do think that Erlang and Elixir are the true microservices dream we all wanted, but the BEAM uses preemptive scheduling and doing things like spinning up a new OS process can be a lot more work in Erlang than you'd deal with in other languages

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#96

Post by davidwparker »

shadowmint wrote: post #93
diab0lic wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very glad you asked! I wrote and deployed (to production) some Clojure code at Netflix just yesterday. Among other things at Netflix the Mantis Query Language (MQL an SQL for streaming data) which ferries around approximately 2 trillion events every day for operational analysis (SPS alerting, quality of experience metrics, debugging production, etc) is written entirely in Clojure. This runs in nearly every criti…

Thats an interesting point that doesn’t answer any of the questions the parent asked. :) Perhaps you can answer this simpler one: Netflix has been using clojure for a long time now; has that been a positive experience broadly speaking, that means clojure is still being used for new projects, or not? Having a large successful project in clojure is lovely, but much of the community’s concern around it is that its hard…

> Did they keep writing more Clojure?

> I wrote and deployed (to production) some Clojure code at Netflix just yesterday.

Seems like he answered at least one.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#97

Post by udfalkso »

jb3689 wrote: post #95
udfalkso wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option worth considering is Elixir. It's also dynamically typed, but the pattern matching helps mitigate dynamic type issues if used correctly. It's a pleasure to work with.

I love Elixir but it's worth noting that I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it for every project because of the performance and base OS integration characteristics of the BEAM. The BEAM is a truly amazing piece of software and I do think that Erlang and Elixir are the true microservices dream we all wanted, but the BEAM uses preemptive scheduling and doing things like spinning up a new OS process can be a lot more work…

Yup, it depends what you're building I suppose. For an Elixir/Phoenix web application or api I've found the performance to be very impressive.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#98

Post by alextheparrot »

diab0lic wrote: post #63
codetrotter wrote: post #6

Would be interested to hear their experiences with Clojure at Netflix for the 5 years that have followed since then. Did they keep writing more Clojure? If so, how much of their code is now in Clojure compared to Java? How much more did they rewrite from Java to Clojure? Do they use Clojure rather than Java for new code? What other languages do they use? Python? Erlang? Rust? How much, in terms of functionality, is w…

I am very glad you asked! I wrote and deployed (to production) some Clojure code at Netflix just yesterday. Among other things at Netflix the Mantis Query Language (MQL an SQL for streaming data) which ferries around approximately 2 trillion events every day for operational analysis (SPS alerting, quality of experience metrics, debugging production, etc) is written entirely in Clojure. This runs in nearly every criti…

Do you know offhand how MQL compares to the Apache Calcite [0] extension of SQL that some big data platforms are using for streaming SQL?

[0] https://calcite.apache.org/docs/stream.html

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#99

Post by xapata »

blandflakes wrote: post #68
m12k wrote: post #55

I'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…

There are a lot of people who claim they're more productive in Clojure, in spite of or because of its dynamic typing. I'll just throw my anecdatum out here: I found that dynamic typing was a major pain even on my own personal projects. I also never found REPL-driven development to mesh well with my workflow. In Scala, for example, entire classes of error that I just shouldn't be able to make don't exist. Maybe I'm ju…

Try to grok REPL-driven development before dynamic typing. You won't like the latter until you love the former.
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