111–120 of 307 posts
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?
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/
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?
ClojureScript never caught on for the front-end work. There are some substantial services for which Elixir was chosen instead of Clojure.
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…
I just inherited a Clojure project, one which I'm quite well acquainted with the business logic, and I find it extremely hard to read. It's very different from the many other languages that I'm comfortable with already. I'm sure with sufficient learning I can get comfortable parsing what's going on, but it is a problem.
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 is still around and a great language for experienced devs. But the experience for newcomers is much less attractive than for other languages, which is preventing growth. Also, the largest Clojure community is the Slack channel, which is hidden from the rest of the world.
Yes, I know you can find it on some archiving site, but it's non-intuitive. Wish they'd move to Discord or Matrix or... pretty much anything else.
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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…
> that means clojure is still being used for new projects, or not?
This has been / will always be a professional choice of the engineer(s) starting a new project at Netflix. Clojure is great for a lot of reasons and lets you target JVM/NodeJS at the same time (our two largest backend languages) but as a LISP most people aren't going to be excited about using it.
> 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.
In my personal experience maintenance has been a breeze. I had a meeting at noon yesterday where a data scientist wanted a new feature in the query language and we had it shipping to production by 3:00pm. If the code base were say 10x as large I'm not sure I'd have the same opinions about ease of maintenance but I haven't leveraged spec and I've been able to continually increase abstraction to keep the code size small as more features came in.
As for falling in popularity that is my perception as well though its current level of popularity still seems sustainable. I'd imagine this has to do with it being a LISP, with STM not being as popular as anticipated and with spec taking longer than anticipated.
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've been making a living using Clojure for a few years now as a solo dev and I don't feel the language is lacking in anything I would care much about. I started with reagent not knowing anything about react or having any Clojure experience and was immediately productive. I was able to augment part of a webapp I had in production in no time due instant feedback loops from the REPL and figwheel. The language is being iterated on but it has already been in such a state in that I'm not keeping up with what's new because I'm able to solve any problem I need to already.
I'm extremely happy with it. I have a lot of interests other than programming and I feel that Clojure allows me to deliver complex projects on time without driving me insane or having to keep up with new trends.
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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 instea…
Re. your edit, which erased "instead of using ClojureScript with Om, people mostly jumped to JavaScript + React, which the Om team later praised as being the same concept they had in mind, but with a simpler and better API": I’m pretty sure that the coment you mention referred to reagent (which builds on top of React as much as om).
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EDIT: Oh! Just figured it out: Pedastal. Yep, originally made by Relevance Inc.
Here's the link of its discontinuation which mentioned React as a big motivator: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pedestal-users/jODwmJUIUcg/6...
> "But unlike in Pedestal App, you don't have to worry about how fine-grained changes to your App model map to the UI."
That's the part I was remembering.
> "So there is clearly conceptual overlap between Pedestal and ReactJS. Further, David Nolen's work on Om has shown that ReactJS and ClojureScript work very well together."
That's probably why I got this mixed up with Om. This all happened about 4 years ago so I guess my memory isn't as fresh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just inherited a Clojure project, one which I'm quite well acquainted with the business logic, and I find it extremely hard to read. It's very different from the many other languages that I'm comfortable with already. I'm sure with sufficient learning I can get comfortable parsing what's going on, but it is a problem.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any previous experience or familiarity with FP? Is it the List syntax, the project organization, or the immutable constraints that are the most challenging?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Same logic applies to clojure. I think that's the point he's making. Everyone and their 12 year old nephew rockstar developer has questions about java. I also find that clojure questions nowadays are mainly asked in the clojurians slack organization. Immediate feedback is more attractive than waiting around hoping for an answer in stackoverflow.
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…
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