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Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

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Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#241

Post by blandflakes »

ken wrote: post #129
blandflakes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds like Clojure was too much "out of your way", and you prefer a language like Scala that gets in your face about possible issues sooner.

I can get on board with this phrasing.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#242

Post by quantisan »

nerdponx wrote: 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 use Clojure for the whole backend, Python for machine learning, and JS for frontend at Motiva AI. It's the fourth company that I worked at (UK and US) with Clojure as one of the main languages. I'd say hiring Clojure devs has been one of the best perks for working with Clojure. Consistently high quality people that I've had the honour to work with.

At Motiva, we've dabbled in other languages like Haskell, Scala, Rust, Go, etc. but Clojure has been what sticks for us on the backend team https://github.com/Motiva-AI. We are a fully distributed remote team and we are hiring. Drop me an email.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#243

Post by zmmmmm »

dgritsko wrote: post #10
nerdponx wrote: 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?

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/

I like the CloudFoundry report [1] better as a reflection of what businesses are actually using rather than search engine metrics (TIOBE) which are overly influenced by controversy and search engine methodologies than actual usage. However it's no prettier a picture, almost no functional languages in the list at all, only Scala making a significant dent (and you can debate whether that is functional or not). Other JVM languages like Groovy are significantly ahead of Clojure in all rankings.

[1] https://www.cloudfoundry.org/wp-content/uploads/Developer-La...

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#244

Post by diab0lic »

gleenn wrote: post #232
kbp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but as a LISP most people aren't going to be excited about using it. 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…

The latest Clojure in the pipe, 1.10, is supposed to have a lot of work done fixing stacktraces FWIW.

I'm very happy to be reading this!

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#245

Post by jwhitlark »

willtim wrote: post #222
akmiller wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, and I was responding to the fact that I never fear refactoring my Clojure code. Your examples of the type safety can all be mimicked with spec in Clojure. Granted spec is opt-in (but I'm guessing so is some of the more detailed type safety attributes you are talking about like NonEmpty). Anyhow, to each their own and one persons experience isn't likely to be the same as the others so I'd encourage everyone t…

Explicit runtime checks that must be manually added are not a substitute for static typing! You should follow your own advice and try out a statically typed language with good inference! Every tool has a sweet spot and large code bases and maintenance is well outside the sweet spot of any dynamic language.

Well, there are certainly classes of problems that I'd use static typing for, but in my experience, static typing != software that gets the job done. That doesn't mean that it holds things back, though.

Many static typing arguments remind me of the Air Force's old "We'll bomb them so hard we won't have to send in ground troops." I just haven't seen it in practice, and the few studies that have looked at it empirically haven't seen a clear advantage either. If you know of such a study, please point it out!

In the end, all sorts of combinations have succeeded or failed, to the point where now when people start talking about "the right tool for the job", I add in "the right tool for the right people in the right environment for the right job..."

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#246

Post by jwhitlark »

Jach wrote: post #185
ken wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason I find it funny that all the comments here about static typing are written in English, a language lacking not only static typing, but a syntax that's possible to automatically check. It lets one say things like "I still static strong typing" (which you've since corrected)! One could write a comment here in Haskell describing why static typing is better, yet nobody ever does. I think even the most arde…

You would probably enjoy this talk by Guy Steele where he discusses the language of mathematics that computer science people use in their papers (Computer Science Metanotation) to talk about other languages. Funnily it's untyped and lacking a rigorous specification... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCuZkaaou0Q

There's a reason why we teach math in kindergarten and proofs in college. There's lots of things that are useful to do without the rigors of rigorous proof.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#247

Post by yogthos »

cutler wrote: post #169
yogthos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These stats look highly suspect with Clojure:Scala = 1.6. Here in London the jobs boards Angel.co and Indeed.com have Scala:Clojure at 3.6 and 19.6 respectively.

It's one of the most comprehensive surveys to date. Meanwhile, the job numbers can relate to many factors. For example, there could be more turn around for Scala jobs.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#248

Post by pyrhho »

ronnier wrote: post #80
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…

I worked in a large company where clojure was used. After the original developers moved on from that project (they always move on), it was a giant struggle to get people who could work in the code base. They ended up rewriting it in something more standard. Whatever benifit clojure provided was outweighed by the high cost of maintaining the code base and the inability to find devs who wanted to work on it. That’s my…

Funny, I have the same story from the other side. They could have chosen to not alienate and lay off the clojure team. We were pretty happy, working on interesting projects, independent enough to get things done. But, turns out paying more for a smaller team of experts who know what they’re doing isn’t compatible with Quarterly-Earnings-Driven-Development.

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#249

Post by truculent »

auganov wrote: post #150

This talk goes into detail how Clojure plays out in larger teams, particularly how they worked to maintain REPLability for a huge monolith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BThkk5zv0DE That said, I think a lot of the preoccupation with rewrites is just premature optimization. Just a while ago I noticed some open source Clojure code of a startup acquired by FB got rewritten in Haskell. Was very glad to see founders don…

FWIW I think this is the startup code referenced: https://github.com/wit-ai/duckling_old

Re: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

#250

Post by truculent »

I always see loads of Static vs Dynamic and Functional vs OO opinions breaking out in the comments. While the discussion is often interesting and insightful, it would be nice to see some empirical analysis of the trade-offs here. Stuff like development time, error rates, maintainability (no idea how you'd measure this one...).

Anyone know if such studies exist? Feels like they should be out there given the amount of discussion the topics generate

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