Specter – Clojure API for immutable programming (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Specter – Clojure API for immutable programming (2017)

#41

Post by mrbonner » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

Darn! This is sleek!

I have been learning Clojure off and on for almost a year now. I gotta say that it has changed my mind to a "Aha, I got lisp now" moment. Working with it is a joy, especially it integrates so well with the JVM and all available Java libraries out there.

I can't believe I have missed Specter during my learning journey. How could I not find out about this soon enough. I mostly deal with static typed languages and seeing the primary use of map and keywords as main data structure scares me. Rich Hicky said not to put too much emphasis in what in the map but the data/keywords you need, kind of like you do not care what in the UPS truck as long as it could deliver your package, right? But, navigating maps and nested data structures around is the pain. Specter definitely easies that pain a lot now that I know it!

This is why I am grateful for hackernews. Once in awhile, browsing the site and discover something like this makes me rethink the ways I do stuff. It also reminds me that I could be missing a lots of similar goodies on my way learning Clojure. I am prepared to have me mind blown again!!!

Re: Specter – Clojure API for immutable programming (2017)

#42

Post by iLemming » Sun, Sep 06, 2020, 1:43 AM UTC

cutler wrote: post #40

devin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is totally incorrect. Join the Clojurians slack and ask around about work. There's plenty opportunity out there. Apple, WalMart, DRW Trading, NuBank, Capital One, and the list goes on and on.

There are always a few outliers for any language but when you look at a larger sample Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable. Take contract roles on IT Jobswatch, for example. 12 conracts in the last 6 months in the whole of London and 1 in the rest of the UK compared with Scala for which there were 279 in London and 128 in the rest of the UK. I'm not a Scala fanboy either. I remember back in 2013 when Cloj…

> Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable

What... are.. you.. talking... about? Do some googling around. Clojure today is the most popular in its category of the languages with strong FP emphasis and slowly and steadily growing. It has already generated more jobs, books, active podcasts, conferences. More than Haskell, OCaml, F#, Elm, Purescript, Erlang, Elixir, Idris, Julia, and has recently surpassed Scala and become 3rd most used JVM language after Java and Kotlin.

Of course, one can say: "actually, none of these have gained much adoption in the industry", and speaking in relative numbers, they'd be right. But those who can no longer bear the pain of writing awful, deeply nested Java class hierarchies or tired of debugging concurrency issues would always find projects to write and sometimes even get paid for, using their preferred tool.

I honestly don't understand people, when they say: "It's really nice, I love it, but I'm getting paid to use something else." Well, do you really expect someone to call you and say: "Hey, I saw your comment on HN, it seems you'd love to use Clojure, can we offer you a lot of money?", or something like that?

I for one, after only a week of playing with Clojure, immediately quit my job. It took me just a few days to find a Clojure gig. I switched jobs three times since then, never (even during the COVID-19 crisis, when I was laid off) was a question for me "Is the fun over? Do I have to start looking for Python jobs now?" Luck of course is a factor, but you have to herd, guide and push your luck forward. It's no one's fault that you are forced to use something you don't like.

Re: Specter – Clojure API for immutable programming (2017)

#43

Post by iLemming » Sun, Sep 06, 2020, 1:59 AM UTC

hota_mazi wrote: post #29

cutler wrote: post #25

So it turns out that Clojure is the ultimate data-wrangling tool yet there's no chance of earning a living with it. So much for innovation. Technology is a strange industry where conservative Java bondage and a 2-bit browser scripting extension with no stdlib reign supreme.

Clojure is wholly inadequate to meeting challenges of the industry today. Not just because it's dynamically typed (which means tooling for it is close to nonexistent and it has terrible performance), but also because its ecosystem is a ghost town. It takes more than just a language to create a productive development environment in 2020, especially one which is so flawed by designed to the point of not even being stat…

> Clojure is wholly inadequate to meeting challenges of the industry today

Interesting point. Sadly, it seems engineers at Apple, Cisco, Walmart, NASA, CircleCI, Pandora, Grammarly, Funding Circle, Nubank and hundreds of other companies are amateurs who don't know jack-shit about challenges in the industry and keep building their sand-castles using their incredibly flawed tools. I'm sure, these losers would soon vanish from the radar and we would never hear about them. Just give it a few years.

Re: Specter – Clojure API for immutable programming (2017)

#44

Post by cutler » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 11:23 PM UTC

iLemming wrote: post #42

cutler wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are always a few outliers for any language but when you look at a larger sample Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable. Take contract roles on IT Jobswatch, for example. 12 conracts in the last 6 months in the whole of London and 1 in the rest of the UK compared with Scala for which there were 279 in London and 128 in the rest of the UK. I'm not a Scala fanboy either. I remember back in 2013 when Cloj…

> Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable What... are.. you.. talking... about? Do some googling around. Clojure today is the most popular in its category of the languages with strong FP emphasis and slowly and steadily growing. It has already generated more jobs, books, active podcasts, conferences. More than Haskell, OCaml, F#, Elm, Purescript, Erlang, Elixir, Idris, Julia, and has recently surpassed Scala…

"... recently surpassed Scala and become 3rd most used JVM language". If we're talking about real, paid jobs then you're not addressing the statistics I quoted. Scala adoption is an order of magnitude higher than Clojure. I'm not talking popularity amongst developers - just real paying jobs which can be relied on to put food on the table and pay mortgages. Sun and Oracle's marketing of Java in the late 90s/early 2000s is a juggernaut compared with which an individual's luck in finding a Clojure job pales into insignificance so, yes, they are responsible/at fault for Java's dominance of paid programming work.