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The Future of Clojure

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Re: The Future of Clojure

#2
I'd love to see clojure take a bigger role in the financial services sector. The fact that it runs on the JVM, gives it a nice foot in the door.

Ideally, it would be great if clojure replaced Python and Scala as the defacto language used to interact with Apache Spark. That's probably not likely, though. It's hard enough to get a lot of folks past spark's weirdness without throwing a lisp into the mix. But it does seem like a functional JVM language that's not Scala would be the optimal way to use spark.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#3
post #2

I'd love to see clojure take a bigger role in the financial services sector. The fact that it runs on the JVM, gives it a nice foot in the door. Ideally, it would be great if clojure replaced Python and Scala as the defacto language used to interact with Apache Spark. That's probably not likely, though. It's hard enough to get a lot of folks past spark's weirdness without throwing a lisp into the mix. But it does see…

See... I work for one of the largest banks in the world and in vicinity of me there is a Clojure project. The guys are trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Original developers left the company or advanced to management roles and now nobody is able to figure out what this convoluted, obfuscated, undefined, unstructured mass of code does or how to modify it so that it doesn't blow up more that it already is.

As much as I love Clojure I see the problem is you need really good (not just intelligent but also wise) developers to reap benefits. Otherwise you can run into huge problems.

"With great power..."

Clojure has so bad rep here that even I think I made a mistake that I let on that I use it for my projects.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#4
post #3
post #2

I'd love to see clojure take a bigger role in the financial services sector. The fact that it runs on the JVM, gives it a nice foot in the door. Ideally, it would be great if clojure replaced Python and Scala as the defacto language used to interact with Apache Spark. That's probably not likely, though. It's hard enough to get a lot of folks past spark's weirdness without throwing a lisp into the mix. But it does see…

See... I work for one of the largest banks in the world and in vicinity of me there is a Clojure project. The guys are trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Original developers left the company or advanced to management roles and now nobody is able to figure out what this convoluted, obfuscated, undefined, unstructured mass of code does or how to modify it so that it doesn't blow up more that it already is. As m…

That's unfortunate, but I see your point. It's a real catch-22. If you build everything in Java it's harder to attract good devs, but if you use something like Clojure you need to attract those good devs.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#5
post #3
post #2

I'd love to see clojure take a bigger role in the financial services sector. The fact that it runs on the JVM, gives it a nice foot in the door. Ideally, it would be great if clojure replaced Python and Scala as the defacto language used to interact with Apache Spark. That's probably not likely, though. It's hard enough to get a lot of folks past spark's weirdness without throwing a lisp into the mix. But it does see…

See... I work for one of the largest banks in the world and in vicinity of me there is a Clojure project. The guys are trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Original developers left the company or advanced to management roles and now nobody is able to figure out what this convoluted, obfuscated, undefined, unstructured mass of code does or how to modify it so that it doesn't blow up more that it already is. As m…

I have noticed that people often use such criticisms against anything they aren't familiar with. If you can find an enthusiastic polyglot who says the same then it becomes a bit more believable. And - of course - the fact that it is so unfamiliar to most is probably a valid criticism anyway.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#6
post #2

I'd love to see clojure take a bigger role in the financial services sector. The fact that it runs on the JVM, gives it a nice foot in the door. Ideally, it would be great if clojure replaced Python and Scala as the defacto language used to interact with Apache Spark. That's probably not likely, though. It's hard enough to get a lot of folks past spark's weirdness without throwing a lisp into the mix. But it does see…

Nubank (a Brazilian based startup-style fintech company) does everything with clojure (on AWS). They bought Plataformatec makers of the Elxir lang.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#7
post #3
post #2

I'd love to see clojure take a bigger role in the financial services sector. The fact that it runs on the JVM, gives it a nice foot in the door. Ideally, it would be great if clojure replaced Python and Scala as the defacto language used to interact with Apache Spark. That's probably not likely, though. It's hard enough to get a lot of folks past spark's weirdness without throwing a lisp into the mix. But it does see…

See... I work for one of the largest banks in the world and in vicinity of me there is a Clojure project. The guys are trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Original developers left the company or advanced to management roles and now nobody is able to figure out what this convoluted, obfuscated, undefined, unstructured mass of code does or how to modify it so that it doesn't blow up more that it already is. As m…

This absolutely matches my experience as a full time Clojure dev at multiple companies. Leadership is desperate to replace the code with something more maintainable. It's gotten bad enough that I will switch languages for my next job, the headaches are not worth it.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#8
post #3
post #2

I'd love to see clojure take a bigger role in the financial services sector. The fact that it runs on the JVM, gives it a nice foot in the door. Ideally, it would be great if clojure replaced Python and Scala as the defacto language used to interact with Apache Spark. That's probably not likely, though. It's hard enough to get a lot of folks past spark's weirdness without throwing a lisp into the mix. But it does see…

See... I work for one of the largest banks in the world and in vicinity of me there is a Clojure project. The guys are trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Original developers left the company or advanced to management roles and now nobody is able to figure out what this convoluted, obfuscated, undefined, unstructured mass of code does or how to modify it so that it doesn't blow up more that it already is. As m…

Maybe if you make it known that you have some Clojure projects and that it might have even a possibility of a future with you, you might be able to attract and hire some good devs

Re: The Future of Clojure

#9
post #5
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See... I work for one of the largest banks in the world and in vicinity of me there is a Clojure project. The guys are trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Original developers left the company or advanced to management roles and now nobody is able to figure out what this convoluted, obfuscated, undefined, unstructured mass of code does or how to modify it so that it doesn't blow up more that it already is. As m…

I have noticed that people often use such criticisms against anything they aren't familiar with. If you can find an enthusiastic polyglot who says the same then it becomes a bit more believable. And - of course - the fact that it is so unfamiliar to most is probably a valid criticism anyway.

The truth is that the candidates we are receiving are barely able to code in Java. Not all know differences between linked lists and arrays and if they know what a breakpoint is they are hired.

Now, imagine giving the people environment that imposes no structure on your project and gives hyper powerful tools like macros and you are in a big problem.

At least with Java you get Spring and this is how you do endpoint, this is how you connect to the database, and so on. The structure is suboptimal and redundant but at least they are getting some guidance which are most likely already familiar with.

In Clojure, as a lead of the project, you would have to do the same but now it would be up to you to define all of that guidance. The question is, are you better at this than entire organization that supports Spring?

The only situation I see where Clojure would realistically be beneficial is when you only get like world class developers who know what they are doing and can work together.

I can't work on a Clojure project with a person that is unable to go through something like Let over Lambda with full understanding of the code examples and trust they will be able to make good decisions when building abstractions with macros.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#10
post #2

I'd love to see clojure take a bigger role in the financial services sector. The fact that it runs on the JVM, gives it a nice foot in the door. Ideally, it would be great if clojure replaced Python and Scala as the defacto language used to interact with Apache Spark. That's probably not likely, though. It's hard enough to get a lot of folks past spark's weirdness without throwing a lisp into the mix. But it does see…

? You can already use clojure with spark[1].

...but just as pyspark is not “pythonic”, clojure spark is super unidomatic to use. ...which is why its languished unused.

I mean, an idiomatic library isn’t impossible; see how databricks has wrapped the pandas api up with its koalas project; you just have invest the time and effort and actually make it.... for what, fundamentally, is a total absence of demand.

or do you mean like first party support for clojure? Thats never going to happen...

[1] https://github.com/gorillalabs/sparkling/

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