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Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

simongray.github.io

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Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#31

Post by simongray »

zelly wrote: post #27

I tried Clojure but ended up hating it for reasons all stemming from its hosted implementation. Whenever I didn't know how to do something, I (and most other Clojure users) would go use some JDK class (or worse, an external Java library) instead of figuring out how to write the Lisp. For some reason this doesn't often happen with regular Lisp even though CFFI is available. There's a tendency to just reimplement it di…

I have to say that I don't really recognise that thing about using JDK classes. I've worked with Clojure for 2 years on a big government project (maybe 50 Clojure devs) and it was full-stack Clojure all the way down. We never used any Java libraries either, but of course basic Java/JS interop is a pretty normal occurrence in Clojure when doing a certain type of code (like reading and writing certain binary files to disk, you'd probably reach for the Java Standard Library). For 99% you need no interop in Clojure. ClojureScript is a bit different as you often do need to access HTML elements or various singleton objects like js/window or js/document and have to use JS interop.

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#32

Post by rubyn00bie »

Last week some nice folks assured me tooling was good in Clojure; and not a total time suck, and so I'm getting ready to take the jump I think... but, one thing I'm still really skeptical about... is embodied in this paragraph:

> The way the languages are integrated today, Clojure developers doing full-stack development don’t really have to think about data serialisation/deserialisation. Writing code for frontend and backend differ mostly just in the way that the different implementations access the host platform. The functional aspects of Clojure, especially the immutability and focus on referential transparency, ensure that source code is mostly split into chunks of highly portable code, with the host-interop conveniently put aside in its own sections. You can move code between frontend and backend at your leisure.

Is it really that good using Clojure across environments and runtimes?

I ask because I tried all of this with Scala years ago (I loved the language) and Ruby to an extent, but it was pretty miserable or rather there was really no reward but more effort on my part. I.e. I'd spend more time annotating, bridging, and learning how to interact with the different runtime than I would writing actual feature code[1].

Or like what are the killer libraries everyone loves? Do they (libs/frameworks) support different clojure runtimes ("hosts?") outta the box? Is it easy to write "pure clojure" projects that work for any clojure project?

The one I know about or have heard most about was Datatomic, which always sounded freakin' brilliant, but I don't fucks with non-free databases. Arcadia I just saw and it looks cool but, it also seems like a dumb mountain to climb, if that's how I wanted to start screwing around with Clojure.

[1] Tools like Scala/ScalaJS and RubyMotion (back in the day, heh), were the reasons I ended up a polyglot. They're great tools, if you know the platform, if you don't, you're pretty much still fucked... but once you know the platform it's kind of hard to want to use them.

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#34

Post by throw03172019 »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #32

Last week some nice folks assured me tooling was good in Clojure; and not a total time suck, and so I'm getting ready to take the jump I think... but, one thing I'm still really skeptical about... is embodied in this paragraph: > The way the languages are integrated today, Clojure developers doing full-stack development don’t really have to think about data serialisation/deserialisation. Writing code for frontend and…

I have been writing helper libs with our shared logic in Clojure (CLJC). It is pretty nice to have the same core on the frontend and backend. It is easy enough to use the conditionals to call a Java fn vs. Javascript for certain logic (I.e Dates, etc)

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#37

Post by simongray »

anmonteiro90 wrote: post #33

It'd be interesting to back the claim that "Clojure is (slowly) eating the world.". Interestingly, that's absolutely not my perspective and I don't see any sources for that statement in the post.

I was talking about its ever expanding reach. It was more of an intertextual reference to the Andreessen Horowitz classic than an ideological statement about the popularity of Clojure, that is why I also added the (slowly).

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#38

Post by slifin »

Random_ernest wrote: post #13

I really like Clojure, it's a well designed language and one can get quite productive, surprisingly fast. My core criticism that is not really mentioned in the article is the error messages. At the beginning I often felt lost and had no idea where to look if something went wrong.

Yeah learning those first errors is a bit annoying learning what IFn is can be a bit cryptic but ClojureScript with shadow or figwheel gives really good errors

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#39

Post by anmonteiro90 »

simongray wrote: post #37
anmonteiro90 wrote: post #33

It'd be interesting to back the claim that "Clojure is (slowly) eating the world.". Interestingly, that's absolutely not my perspective and I don't see any sources for that statement in the post.

I was talking about its ever expanding reach. It was more of an intertextual reference to the Andreessen Horowitz classic than an ideological statement about the popularity of Clojure, that is why I also added the (slowly).

That makes sense but it's not what comes across. The sentence immediately after says that "the language continues to grow". That's what I'm questioning.

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#40

Post by simongray »

anmonteiro90 wrote: post #39
simongray wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about its ever expanding reach. It was more of an intertextual reference to the Andreessen Horowitz classic than an ideological statement about the popularity of Clojure, that is why I also added the (slowly).

That makes sense but it's not what comes across. The sentence immediately after says that "the language continues to grow". That's what I'm questioning.

That is my impression, especially 2019 seems to have been a turning point after 1-2 years of relative stagnation, but I get that you feel differently. That's why you switched to OCaml ;-)
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