How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
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Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
#2I really enjoy reading anecdotes like the above. Programming languages are how we express intent to systems, and a complex enough domain where quantifying the tradeoffs is sufficiently difficult.
Teams can succeed or fail using any language, but there is a tangible factor somewhere between the language, available libraries and practitioners.
Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
#3Great article. Even in a large enterprise, where the prevailing organizational ideology centers around building the largest headcount you can for political sway...
I've kept my team small on purpose, and we were able to be very effective by adopting clojure. We have sway because we deliver- and that's a different type of leverage than headcount. We don't get thrown every hot potato, instead we're consistently aligned with the critical portfolios.
A small dedicated team with tools such as clojure will outdeliver, and outcompete a larger team who cannot remain agile and require significant overhead to manage.
I'm basically rehashing PG's 'Beating the Averages', but it's been my experience as a dev mgr. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
#4> There is no other language that places such an emphasis on programming directly with plain and naked data literals.
Counterexamples: Erlang and Elixir. Arguably also Prolog. Also Lua. Many Schemes, and Racket. Of course, REBOL and Red. TCL probably, too.
I can't help but think that people making claims of "no other language has X" are in most cases wrong, and should study a bit more before making them.
There's a lot of hype in the article, I don't want to diminish the value of REPL-based workflows or conciseness[1] of the language, but the overall message that any fresh graduate can become a 10x programmer in under a month... Well, there's at least nothing humble about it, despite the article touting "humility" as a virtue of prospective Clojurists.
[1] Why aren't we all writing in APL/K/J if it matters that much?
Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
#5I'm running my own fairly successful self-funded business, largely thanks to Clojure and ClojureScript, which let me reduce incidental complexity and focus on what matters. So yes, a Clojure developer can do quite a bit alone :-)
Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
#6> I am not using the REPL much, am I doing something wrong?
Applies to python, too. I am always surprised if developers and data scientists working with python don't know that ipython, and by extension the python Jupiter kernels, come with a repl that hotloads code changes from local installs:
%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2
Is usually my first cell in a notebook.
Repls are so powerful. The repl like behavior of flutter is also why our mobile dev likes it so much.
Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
#7The description here of using the Clojure REPL for development is one of the best I've seen. I think part of the issue is nomenclature -- Read Eval Print Loop applies to lots of systems in lots of languages that many devs are familiar with that are not really what Clojure devs mean when they say "REPL." The actual experience is closer to something like Smalltalk where you alter a running system and experiment with it incrementally.
Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
#8> There is no other language that places such an emphasis on programming directly with plain and naked data literals. Counterexamples: Erlang and Elixir. Arguably also Prolog. Also Lua. Many Schemes, and Racket. Of course, REBOL and Red. TCL probably, too. I can't help but think that people making claims of "no other language has X" are in most cases wrong, and should study a bit more before making them. There's a lo…
I also thought the bit about fresh graduates having no pride rather blanket. There are plenty of prideful fresh graduates with the kind of pride that experience hasn't yet tempered to produce a humble respect for the fact that you will die knowing next to nothing. Sadly, even some old timers never catch on to that.
Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
#9> I am not using the REPL much, am I doing something wrong? Applies to python, too. I am always surprised if developers and data scientists working with python don't know that ipython, and by extension the python Jupiter kernels, come with a repl that hotloads code changes from local installs: %load_ext autoreload %autoreload 2 Is usually my first cell in a notebook. Repls are so powerful. The repl like behavior of f…
I like Python, but the using the REPL w/ Python's indentation is not fun for me.
Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
#10> Most people need some trainings to be able to get into something new. If they have not been taught REPL driven programming, I don't think they can discover it by themselves, despite maybe hearing others talking about it constantly.
Does Emacs count? I don't know Clojure, but I learned elisp for programming emacs and I discovered myself the power of evaluating any part of the code I write on the fly, experimenting with it. It's really useful in practice.