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How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

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Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#51

Post by cyberbanjo »

csbartus wrote: post #50
sli wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly every compile-to-JS language is a better choice than JS unless you really, truly need something legacy. The exception might be Coffeescript, but even that's not bad , it just add a whole lot. Even then I'm certain you can find a modern language that can target, say, ES3. I've never needed that, so I won't claim to know any off the top of my head. But it doesn't matter, because you could simply pass the output…

Interesting mix :) I wonder why CLJS / Reagent is not enough, and where the others step in... I mean in my fantasy CLJS / Lisp is so powerful one never looks back to languages relying on commas and colons

Clojure uses colons for :keywords, and commas for unquote.

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#52

Post by klibertp »

huahaiy wrote: post #46
klibertp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

REBOL and TCL are languages which go at least as far as Clojure in data-centric programming. Both feature incredibly elegant DSL for a variety of tasks, like constructing parsers or defining GUIs. Personally, I don't have an opinion on whether they (including Clojure) take it too far, but it's true that even that culture is not unique to Clojure :)

I don't know about REBOL, but I did program TCL extensively in my graduate school years. I agree TCL has a lot of similarity in term of treating code as data like in Lisp, but I do not think it has such an emphasis on data oriented programming like in Clojure. That's just not true.

It might not be immediately clear, but the "data oriented programming" discussed in this subthread is about using code as data to be interpreted. That TCL has way less primitive data structures and even less syntax for them doesn't mean it doesn't treat a lot of the code as data. REBOL[1] and Red, on the other hand, do have a comparable collection of data structures along with literal syntax for them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol#Dialects

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#53

Post by darioush »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #37

I don't use Clojure, but I've applied some of its lessons to my work in Julia. The biggest one is the benefit of using simple, literal datatypes over classes/structs. If a function takes literals, you can just pick it up and run it, and if most of your code uses simple data types, it's more composable by default. The mini-project I'm working on now has just one custom type, if I had written it 2 years ago it would pr…

Funny how a lot of "work" on large scale code bases boils down to de-coupling code from the datatypes they never needed to be dependent on (eg, function takes obj but only needs obj.foo)

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#54

Post by paulz_ »

sdfsfsf3kjdf wrote: post #47
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #11

Because Clojure is not terribly fashionable, I imagine the developer pool is much smaller but the candidates are higher quality, mostly due to self-selecting. I really like the sentiment of empowering individual developers to the max. It's funny, a lot of organizations want to beat the averages whilst engineering in an identical fashion to their competitors. You're not going to consistently get outstanding results if…

> I imagine the developer pool is much smaller but the candidates are higher quality People always say this about their favorite niche language and it always feels a little too self serving with little evidence to back it up. Learning languages is relatively simple and enjoyable, especially when the overwhelming majority of those people never end up working on difficult problems in said language. I think it often giv…

I can see what your getting at but I think this applies beyond programming languages. If you're interviewing someone who is into a niche programming language it can be a sign they are more interested in programming than say, someone who only knows Java etc. Obviously this won't always be the case and can lead to a weird sort of credentialing where people pretend to be into obscure languages.

It would be like if you were interviewing a chef who was saying "yeah yeah pan frying is fine but let me tell you about sous vide."

Then you go on to interview another guy who is into working the grill at chain restaurants.

Is the Sous Vide guy better? Certainly not always. But it can be an indicator this guy is a real nerd about cooking in a way that results in a better meal at the end.

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#55

Post by Jtsummers »

FPGAhacker wrote: post #12
klibertp wrote: post #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 lo…

I haven’t written any Clojure for a few years now. So my knowledge and technique is out of date, but I have a contrary opinion on “repl driven” development vs many Clojure advocates. In short: your repl compiled code is state that you now have to track in your head. Yeah, great, you can compile a single function and it hot loads. It’s pretty awesome for experimenting and debug, but the longer your repl session is ope…

I think this gets to the issue that there are two different ideas of "REPL driven".

In one, you're using the REPL frequently in production. In the other you're using it during development. Those are two different scenarios and result in different perspectives.

Just like many (most?) organizations have gone to (varying degrees of) infrastructure as code versus tweaking each server manually, REPL-in-production is similarly problematic. As you noted, you end up in a position where you aren't actually sure of the system state (both what it is and how it got there). This is a use of the REPL that should be minimized (if you're using it to actually change the system state versus trying to understand the system state, especially).

However, when working on a new system you may tweak a single or small cluster of servers manually and build out your automation scripts based on that experience. Similarly, the REPL during development is a way to quickly prototype, experiment, and test code but needs to end up committed to actual source files for deployment.

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#56

Post by [deleted] »

quasarj wrote: post #23
jdminhbg wrote: post #7

The 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…

I guess I need to watch some of the videos he links, because this sounds horrible to me. I mostly work in Python, which has a repl (though I'm sure not as complete) and sometimes I poke around in it. But if I am working on a real project, or even just a small script, I always want to run it from the beginning on every invocation, because anything short of that is not proof that it works. "Editing a running system" so…

[deleted]

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#57

Post by CraigJPerry »

jimbokun wrote: post #42
klibertp wrote: post #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 lo…

> [1] Why aren't we all writing in APL/K/J if it matters that much? Because most programmers aren't nearly as productive as we could be. And because "concise" should be measure in the number of tokens needed to achieve certain functionality, not by excessive use of single character tokens.

I wonder if there’s a sweet spot for verbosity or if it doesn’t really correlate with bugs or productivity. I end up thinking about this pretty regularly.

For example Kdb/q has always fascinated me, my initial reaction was that encoding meaning into fewer symbols surely causes cognitive overload and promotes programmer failure, and yet i saw some python code written by a quant converted to q by a kdb developer. The original python was well written, it relied on pandas and numpy but all fairly garden variety stuff.

The q had exactly the same behaviour except some small changes for data ingestion. Around 500 lines of python, 16, not a typo, 16 lines of q. The performance comparison was absurd too.

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#58

Post by SatvikBeri »

darioush wrote: post #53
SatvikBeri wrote: post #37

I don't use Clojure, but I've applied some of its lessons to my work in Julia. The biggest one is the benefit of using simple, literal datatypes over classes/structs. If a function takes literals, you can just pick it up and run it, and if most of your code uses simple data types, it's more composable by default. The mini-project I'm working on now has just one custom type, if I had written it 2 years ago it would pr…

Funny how a lot of "work" on large scale code bases boils down to de-coupling code from the datatypes they never needed to be dependent on (eg, function takes obj but only needs obj.foo)

It's a problem without an easy solution. There are some cases where you genuinely want to couple fields together basically all the time (e.g. a database driver, address, etc. into a "DB" object) but there are many more cases where you want to couple fields together 80% of the time. Those are the hard ones to deal with - separate your fields, and you need to do a lot of redundant work, but if you combine them that can be a pain to unravel and slow down your loops.

Julia's multiple dispatch is really helpful here, because you can e.g. write one connect_to_db that takes a DB object, and another that takes a string. I've found this flexibility to be surprisingly helpful, it completely takes away the tradeoff in many (not all) cases.

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#59

Post by sedachv »

quasarj wrote: post #23
jdminhbg wrote: post #7

The 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…

I guess I need to watch some of the videos he links, because this sounds horrible to me. I mostly work in Python, which has a repl (though I'm sure not as complete) and sometimes I poke around in it. But if I am working on a real project, or even just a small script, I always want to run it from the beginning on every invocation, because anything short of that is not proof that it works. "Editing a running system" so…

How do you use your computer? A Unix shell is literally a REPL over a stateful filesystem.

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#60

Post by roninhacker »

jimbokun wrote: post #42
klibertp wrote: post #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 lo…

> [1] Why aren't we all writing in APL/K/J if it matters that much? Because most programmers aren't nearly as productive as we could be. And because "concise" should be measure in the number of tokens needed to achieve certain functionality, not by excessive use of single character tokens.

>And because "concise" should be measure in the number of tokens needed to achieve certain functionality, not by excessive use of single character tokens.

I am totally nitpicking here, but as a longtime Clojure programmer, I do have a bit of APL envy. Aaron Hsu (noted APL guy) made the point that brevity (in the linear, #-of-characters sense) let's you decrease complexity by avoiding indirection---when the body of a function is shorter than any name you might give it, you can just...write it...rather than writing it somewhere else and calling it.

I don't plan to switch away from Clojure any time soon, but I definitely want to play around with the APLs.

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