Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Future of Clojure

thoughtworks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–309 of 309 posts

Re: The Future of Clojure

#301

Post by johnnycerberus »

smarx007 wrote: post #189
bit_logic wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit surprised to hear this, I thought Clojure shops would be better than this. It was must hard to find any candidates and they're still doing the stupid leetcode interview style? Are these companies putting any thought into their hiring process? That process was created by FANG because they can abuse their candidates and still get a lot of applicants (although I think this is less true than it used to be) But…

Alternative perspective: we were thinking to hire an M.Sc. thesis worker to do some work in Prolog and we definitely contemplated how to make the interview harder. The point was not to be monsters. Instead, Prolog is harder than JS and thesis is shorter than a few-year contract and there is less help on SO. If we hire someone who can barely write Prolog or understand what RDFS inteference is, the output will be nearl…

Prolog is not harder than JavaScript, it is just different. I would hire somebody that is interested in Prolog and good with data structures and algorithms in general, and by good I mean knowing the nitty-gritty behind them. In my experience, exotic languages are not enough, they are not good indicators that you have a prospect in front of you.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#302

Post by aeoleonn »

jb1991 wrote: post #223
aeoleonn wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a contract job, I had to use ReAgent, ClojureScript's "this compiles into ReactJS" framework. Wow, what a pain-- all I could think is "Why don't we just use Reactjs?". Clojure itself is decent. But as you mention-- "n practice everyone expects you to use poorly-maintained clojure-ish libraries to paper over the java/javascript bits, which get out of date quickly.' That is indeed the problem I saw.

What did you find painful about Reagent? I used the first version of Om for many years, which by now is definitely old and outdated, but it still was much more enjoyable and productive than directly using ReactJS. Reagent is a small, simple library that makes interacting with React quite straightforward as well, so I'm curious your pain points.

The lazy bastard that I am, I already knew ReactJS. ClojureScript's stack traces suck. I just didn't want to have to implement stuff in ClojureScript when I could write it in a language I was more familiar with. ReAgent/ClojureScript just seemed hacky. I don't remember specifics as it was almost 2 years ago.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#303

Post by alexeiz »

pinchhit wrote: post #181

As a person who has and currently does work professionally in clojure (at multiple all-clojure shops): The smart engineer effect is extremely overblown. You will hire smarter-than-average engineers, but with a caveat that no one talks about: they are all self-selected for being people who enjoy tinkering on computer science problems to a fault, and not necessarily your business. So the breakdown is that you get 10 su…

> 10 super-smart people, but 9 of them are focused on myopic bits of code plumbing or reinventing APIs or something

Hey, that's me! After 20 years I learnt to let go and start caring about the business a little bit more than about the code plumbing.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#304

Post by humourl3ss »

ashtonkem wrote: post #18
dustingetz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What % of Java projects fail again? With Java, your convoluted mess is 100k to millions LOC. With Clojure, the same devs make the same convoluted mess but in 10k to 100k LOC, and you've left the door open for an inspired "true Scotsman" to come in and do the whole thing in 5k. But management has to understand that, and of course the principle agent problem, peter principle, politics, conways law ... Java is great for…

It’s really hard to argue that Java projects fail at unusual rates, given how much stuff runs on Java.

There is a bit of survivorship bias there, I've seen a lot of Java projects fail, but the blame is only partly on the language, really its the fact that there are so many developers, and the pareto distribution of good to bad java programmers. That and business do not know what the f*ck they are doing. I've seen really good java devs at work, the software they produce is amazing, but the code and structure is incomprehensible, they are masters and I am a mere mortal. Clojure on the other-hand is simpler, higher level, more expressive, but you can still shoot your foot, just like java.

Re: The Future of Clojure

#305

Post by ieugen »

mumblemumble wrote: post #119
gorjusborg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin and Scala are closer to Java, so it makes sense it would be an easier sell to Java shops. I don't use Clojure professionally, and have often wondered how well it holds up in companies where avg tenure of an engineer is 2-3 years. I guess that assumes that a tenure of 2-3 years is not a problem in itself.

I recently inherited a Clojure codebase whose original developers are all long gone. I'm finding the experience to be a bit like trying to learn how to navigate a city where none of the streets have names. When I was working my way through Clojure for the Brave and True , I really liked all the clever techniques around data-level programming and informal interfaces. Not having to stop to define and name formal types…

It will probably be hacked to shreds, but then again the map is most likely immutable ;).

Re: The Future of Clojure

#306

Post by puredanger »

nanomonkey wrote: post #81

It's interesting to see so many people complain that it's hard to hire Clojure engineers, when I've had the exact opposite problem...trying to find a Clojure shop to join. They are few and far between, and the few that are hiring say that they will take folks that are new to Clojure, but then are baffled when you don't know how to idiomatically solve whiteboard problems. Clojure remedies all of my problems with previ…

Lots of jobs in this recent job thread btw: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/k937mc/who_is_hiri...

Re: The Future of Clojure

#307

Post by puredanger »

coltnz wrote: post #221

This was a little bit disappointing for me to be honest, as someone who loves the language and runs Clojure teams. Obviously not aimed at the hardcore Clojure crowd but still I hoped for more on the actual future. There was a mention of more resources with no specifics and reassuring comments on things not fundamentally changing as before [as in earlier announcements]. Things I'd ask: - What are the new resources (fo…

Lots of good questions here. https://building.nubank.com.br/welcoming-cognitect-nubank/ from Ed Wible, CTO at Nubank is a good read that answers many of them btw. Also see https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nubank.

> What are the new resources (for Clojure? or just Datomic?), how are they being used? Does Nubank have opinions / direction on these resources.

Since Cognitect joined Nubank, several people have joined the Datomic team, both new hires and internal moves from Nubank and the rate of development has increased. We are also looking at expanding the Clojure team in the near future.

> Has an open sourced Datomic been discussed?

No changes planned.

> Who owns the Clojure trademarks and IP going forward. Any talk of a Clojure Foundation?

Clojure was and is an independent project and Rich Hickey is a joint owner (along with contributors) to the Clojure copyrights. From Rich's announcement on the Clojure mailing list: "Clojure remains independent, and development and stewardship will continue as it has, with more resources and a much larger sponsoring organization in Nubank."

> Alex Miller does an awesome job but boy he has a lot to cover.

Thanks and indeed! As above, we are likely to expand the Clojure team in the future.

> There was talk a few years ago of facilitating community involvement with a PEP type process

We created https://ask.clojure.org as a way for Clojure users to discuss problems important for them and to allow voting on those problems for their importance. We use that information to inform decisions about what to work on so I encourage all Clojure users to express their needs there!

> Clojurescript has left Core. Is Nubank likely to want to get involved here?

Cognitect was, and Nubank now is, the primary sponsor for ClojureScript (funding both David Nolen and Mike Fikes).

Re: The Future of Clojure

#308

Post by puredanger »

brundolf wrote: post #214
atdixon wrote: post #27

A common point is being made in the threads here: "The downside of Clojure is that you need good, wise developers..." The converse of this is that good, wise developers are going to (ultimately) _demand_ Clojure. What I mean by this: I was a Java programmer for years and increasingly started writing code in a more functional, immutable, dynamic style with the occasional need for meta-programming -- for the sheer need…

I'd be curious to see a survey of what background the average Clojure enthusiast has. If many of them come from Enterprise Java, it makes total sense to me why the enthusiasm for Clojure is so high (in fact, that's Rich Hickey's background). Java is: boilerplate-y, slow to iterate with, hard to express higher-level concepts in, requires lots of ceremony (in everything from type definitions to the build system). Cloju…

Lots of data on this from the annual survey: https://clojure.org/news/2020/02/20/state-of-clojure-2020

Re: The Future of Clojure

#309

Post by nanomonkey »

puredanger wrote: post #306
nanomonkey wrote: post #81

It's interesting to see so many people complain that it's hard to hire Clojure engineers, when I've had the exact opposite problem...trying to find a Clojure shop to join. They are few and far between, and the few that are hiring say that they will take folks that are new to Clojure, but then are baffled when you don't know how to idiomatically solve whiteboard problems. Clojure remedies all of my problems with previ…

Lots of jobs in this recent job thread btw: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/k937mc/who_is_hiri...

Thanks puredanger. I'll check it out.
Post reply on HN