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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

#71

Post by vemv »

ken wrote: post #69
vemv wrote: post #57

My personal perspective (after 8 years clojuring, half of that professionally) is that Clojure keeps progressing, with ever better tools and ideas for getting stuff done, optimally. I remain optimistic. At the same time, it still fails at my "golden test": can I gather 5 random freelance engineers and get them to ship a project within a few months, wasting almost no billable time? I can (and have) with Ruby, Typescri…

Maybe I’m just dense, but I certainly have not been productive with any language on day 3. (Not even Ruby, which feels comfortable faster than most languages.) I sometimes felt productive that soon but I always end up having to rewrite once I learn the language fully. I’ve learned enough languages that I can spot “a person’s first program in X” now pretty easily.

My background is freelancing/consulting where it's not uncommon to gather diverse individuals to work on a greenfield project.

There's an implicit assumption that all participants know a thing or two about programming, and accordingly are apt learners.

So yes, on day 3 the code won't be perfect, neither on day 6 but after a few code reviews one can get stuff done.

Personally I wouldn't be comfortable prescribing Clojure for such a project, in contrast to other languages which I've never coded in, but that I know that socially, today, work better.

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#72

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#73

Post by peatmoss »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #24
simongray wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clojure is functional to the core and innovates a lot of areas, while other Lisps are more multi-paradigm and slant towards an OOP style. If you want to work universally with persistent data structures in your code and the libraries you use, Clojure is really the only option. Clojure also modernises Lisp syntax slightly (and a bit controversially) by getting rid of lots of parentheses and introducing new styles of pa…

Personally, I like what Clojure has done for Lisp syntax. I don’t have the greatest eyesight anymore and Clojure makes it easier to read my code.

I agree. Greg Hendershott apparently also agreed as he ported some Clojurisms to racket in the form of a language / loadable library:

https://docs.racket-lang.org/rackjure/index.html

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#74

Post by rufugee »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #49
scarredwaits wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can attest that full stack (server-browser) Clojure code sharing works very-very smoothly. I've been developing web applications like that for some time now, and apart from less context swithing (because it's the same language on both sides), sizeable parts of the code are cross-compiled to run both on the browser and the JVM with very little or no extra effort. Example 1: I'm using Clojure's Spec library for valid…

Thank you so much for the response! Number 3 has me totally stoked; since that's incredibly valuable-- or like a dream to me to be honest, could you speak more about how that works? Is it just from using re-frame (which I'm looking at as I write this)? Is it able to test for visual regressions because of the pure-data UI? Or like how have you found that testing functionality in practice has it been saving y'all a lot…

Agreed... would love to hear more about this as well....

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#75

Post by crispinb »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #59
tensor wrote: post #26

Startup time isn't what is holding the language back. In my opinion it's: 1. Tooling. You end up spending way more time getting your tooling setup than it should be. 2. Difficulty in learning. 3. Clear best practices and frameworks. The philosophy of composing libraries is extremely powerful, but to gain broader adoption you still need straight forward frameworks and opinionated best practices. The last point has man…

What got me started with Clojure was a coworker at megacorp. He's since moved on to a company that makes widespread use of Clojure in production. Startup time was a huge factor for me because I wanted to write command line tools with it. The leaky abstractions were the other painful part – Clojure itself wasn't so bad, but Clojurescript (which would sidestep the startup issue) always seemed to leave me in callback he…

Clojure seems like an odd choice for command line tools. I can see why a committed Clojure programmer would want to reuse their existing skills for a slightly mismatching domain. But Rust/Go (even C) would seem like a more obvious choice if you weren't setting off from Clojure as a starting point.

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#76

Post by pron »

peatmoss wrote: post #68
pron wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from being faster, more mature and with better observability, why is bringing "the JVM along for the ride" different from bringing Racket's runtime along? Also, you do know that Oracle is behind OpenJDK, has been for ten years, and has recently made the JDK completely open-source and free of field-of-use restrictions for the first time in Java's history?

I haven’t figured out a way with the JVM / Clojure to compile and distribute a small self-contained bundle nearly as easily as I can with Racket. And Graal (the option I’m aware of for compiling JVM-based code into a redistributable binary) is definitely Oracle. If I wrote more long-running code, or I could redistribute a stripped down JVM as easily as with Racket’s build tool “raco” I might have a different view, an…

OpenJDK is also made (primarily) by Oracle [1]; in fact, OpenJDK is the name of Oracle's one and only Java implementation project, although Oracle builds both free and support subscription binaries from it. Both OpenJDK and Graal are open source, though. OpenJDK now includes a tool called jlink [2] that allows you to create a small, self-contained bundle that includes a custom runtime as well as your app.

[1]: http://openjdk.java.net/

[2]: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/13/docs/specs/man/jli...

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#77

Post by Zelphyr »

What I want to know is where to find a Clojure and/or ClojureScript job. I got a taste of Clojure on a project late last year and became enamored with it. So much so that I would love to find a job where I can use it at least part of the time.

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#78

Post by elwell »

yarrel wrote: post #64

The dealbreakers with Clojure for me are: 1. Weirdly irregular syntax. 2. Java import statements and Java error backtraces anywhere you want to do real work. 3. Inexcusable renaming and name collisions on basic Lisp functions. It's much, much less of a Lisp than Scheme and neither "but it's properly functional" nor "we fixed the tooling now" make that any less true or the language any more interesting for the use cas…

> Weirdly irregular syntax.

"Irregular syntax", as in not consistent with itself? Or, with historical LISPs? Some examples would be interesting.

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#79

Post by sbmassey »

lispm wrote: post #66
simongray wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common talking points are * Clojure is based on seqs rather than cons cells. * Clojure renamed certain common functions, like car and cdr, so 30 year old Lisp example code no longer compiles. * Clojure doesn't have implicit tail call optimisation for recursion. * Clojure reveals its host platform when it has runtime errors.

Clojure did not just rename a few functions. It's basically zero source code compatible with Lisps. Not only old example code does not run, nothing runs. No applications, no libraries, no tools, ... It's not even easy to port. It's a rewrite and/or redesign. Obviously this is okay for people who don't care of the historical baggage (and want to avoid it) and who don't care about the functionality of Lisps, like inter…

Nothing is sharable between Common Lisp and Scheme, either, but Scheme is generally considered a Lisp.

Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

#80

Post by emmanueloga_ »

Zelphyr wrote: post #77

What I want to know is where to find a Clojure and/or ClojureScript job. I got a taste of Clojure on a project late last year and became enamored with it. So much so that I would love to find a job where I can use it at least part of the time.

Try the #jobs channel of https://clojurians.slack.com/
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