121–130 of 307 posts
amazed to see there are people who find myObject.myMethod(x, y, z); easier to read than (my-function x y z) - that's 2 delimiters in Clojure vs 6 in your C-style language
In fairness, it'd actually be: (my-method my-object x y z) But yes, the Lisp version is so much clearer to me. I just don't get why it's not more popular.
(object-as-namespace/my-function x y z)
still fewer delimiters and less noise
[0] http://junction.cj.com/article/introducing-insights-cj-affil...
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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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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…
What are the performance issues? People (e.g. Instagram) deploy scaled apps in Python, which is far less performant. Bleacher report obsesses about information push latency, and they use an all elixir stack that deploys to at least a million users. Not to mention WhatsApp.
If most of what you're doing is a little minimal data transformation, but otherwise shuffling data to different network locations, and you want consistent latency/throughput, Elixir is a dream. If you're doing some tight number crunching, then not so much.
No wonder the company had successful projects in every asoteric languages.
Now, I come from executive background in corporate job where going with anything other than Java is considered risky. This came off as suprise to me.
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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…
And now that I've responded to the GP, to address your points: > 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 us…
I agree that Clojure has a lot of strong points and that s-expressions probably put a lot of people off, but as a Lisp programmer, I was very disappointed in Clojure's debugging/interactive development story (and I've heard that from a lot of others). It feels more like using a typical scripting language compared to the traditional Lisp/Smalltalk experience, and even there, a typical scripting language would at least give useful backtraces. As it stands, I think a decent number of conventional Lisp programmers would also worry about large Clojure programs being unmaintainable unless they're superbly written.
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I'd disagree with this. Primarily been developing with Clojure for 5 years now with some pretty large codebases. It does depend on how you write your code but favoring pure functions, pushing immutability to the edges of your programs allows you to refactor without fear. Clojure also has many things to aid in this such as pre/post conditions, clojure.spec (which allows you to build complex type definitions), and of c…
Having spent the last two years working professionally in Haskell after having spent the previous two years working professionally in Clojure, I'd disagree with this. Haskell is roughly infinitely better than Clojure for meaningful refactoring. Clojure gives you (great) tools for using your own brain to make sure the refactor goes well. Haskell replaces your brain almost entirely in the process and just gives you a p…
I would suggest that if you have runtime bugs popping up in Clojure programs then that would suggest the inputs to functions (since they should be primarily pure) are not being validated which can easily be accomplished. I would imagine this needs to be done in Haskell as well since just verifying types does not indicate valid data.
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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
You can't necessarily do it in Haskell, either, on account of the whole partial functions thing.
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…
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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…
Hey, sorry I saw that and typed a quick response just as I woke up. I'm not usually at a computer so early in the day. I'll address these now that I'm in front of a machine. :) > Did they keep writing more Clojure? Yes but it has never been the primary language at Netflix. > How much more did they rewrite from Java to Clojure? Very little, if any was rewritten from Java. > If so, how much of their code is now in Cloj…