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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?

#81

Post by huahaiy »

klibertp wrote: post #49
huahaiy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said you "need" REPL. Doing REPL driven programming is just more productive, hence it is considered the right way in the Clojure community. Heck, you don't even "need" any higher level languages, you can write code in machine code, but that's besides the point. Your boast about your Lisp credentials is exactly the kind of things I caution against in the article. Your pride has prevented you from properly learn…

> Nobody said you "need" REPL. Well, you did, quoting the article: > Yes, if you are not using the REPL, you are not doing Clojure right. or should I understand this another way? > but that's besides the point. True. I'm saying that if you need to code in a particular way to make good use of the REPL, then it's already worse than being able to use the REPL well without any special coding style. Erlang and Elixir are…

Then it is actually far worse than what I guessed. You know next to nothing about Clojure, but somehow feel that you are qualified to have an opinion about it. That doesn't look good, does it?

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#82

Post by renox »

jolux wrote: post #17
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…

>Why aren't we all writing in APL/K/J if it matters that much? In all seriousness I think writing more code in APL would probably cut down on bugs, but array-oriented languages are so far beyond how most programmers think about programming, and look so obscure, that I don't think there's any hope of them seeing widespread adoption. Most people loathe point-free Haskell, so I can only imagine what they'd think of the…

Well I've had a few lesson in APL a long time ago and what I remember is that APL is a write-only language. So I doubt that it would 'cut down on bugs'

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#83

Post by klibertp »

huahaiy wrote: post #81
klibertp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody said you "need" REPL. Well, you did, quoting the article: > Yes, if you are not using the REPL, you are not doing Clojure right. or should I understand this another way? > but that's besides the point. True. I'm saying that if you need to code in a particular way to make good use of the REPL, then it's already worse than being able to use the REPL well without any special coding style. Erlang and Elixir are…

Then it is actually far worse than what I guessed. You know next to nothing about Clojure, but somehow feel that you are qualified to have an opinion about it. That doesn't look good, does it?

What opinion about Clojure?! Where? You're jumping to conclusions without any basis, while trying to caution others not to jump to conclusions?

I'm talking about the general ease of use of features in programming languages. If you need to code in a particular way to use a feature, then it's harder to use than if you didn't have to do this. Is that wrong? Could you provide any argument on why is it wrong? And yes, I use Clojure's REPL as an example, and give Erlang as a counterexample. Do you know Erlang? Are you able to compare? If yes, why don't you write about how you see that comparison?

Instead of, you know, childishly fixating on things I never said. For your information, I do know more than "next to nothing" about Clojure. But you won't believe me either way, will you?

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#84

Post by Jtsummers »

renox wrote: post #82
jolux wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why aren't we all writing in APL/K/J if it matters that much? In all seriousness I think writing more code in APL would probably cut down on bugs, but array-oriented languages are so far beyond how most programmers think about programming, and look so obscure, that I don't think there's any hope of them seeing widespread adoption. Most people loathe point-free Haskell, so I can only imagine what they'd think of the…

Well I've had a few lesson in APL a long time ago and what I remember is that APL is a write-only language. So I doubt that it would 'cut down on bugs'

It becomes less "write-only" as you build up experience. It's just not as readily learnable (if you're already a programmer) as most other languages. I mean, procedural and OO languages seem to have largely adopted a variation of Algol or C syntax with roughly comparable semantics to others in the same family. A programmer in C, Java, JavaScript, Fortran, Ada, Pascal, Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, etc. can mostly jump to the others and be able to at least read the program without much difficulty, though learning to write and extend the program (especially idiomatically) will take more time.

APL's syntax and semantics are much different so it has a larger barrier for getting to the level of reading or extending programs written in it, but it's not impossible to reach that level with a bit of practice. I spent a few months doing APL for 2-3 hours a week in the evenings and I was able to develop a reasonable level of competence in it (though not so much I'd drop it on my CV), I can still read it pretty easily now a couple years later and without really touching it since then.

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#85

Post by jolux »

renox wrote: post #82
jolux wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why aren't we all writing in APL/K/J if it matters that much? In all seriousness I think writing more code in APL would probably cut down on bugs, but array-oriented languages are so far beyond how most programmers think about programming, and look so obscure, that I don't think there's any hope of them seeing widespread adoption. Most people loathe point-free Haskell, so I can only imagine what they'd think of the…

Well I've had a few lesson in APL a long time ago and what I remember is that APL is a write-only language. So I doubt that it would 'cut down on bugs'

>Well I've had a few lesson in APL a long time ago and what I remember is that APL is a write-only language.

This is not how everyone who writes APL feels about it. It is recognized that it takes quite a while to really internalize how the operators work and compose, though. One advantage of APL stated by Aaron Hsu is that because the code is so small, if you find it confusing, you get in the habit of rewriting it frequently, and at least for him, it gets clearer over time. I have only dabbled myself (Primarily an OCaml and Elixir/Erlang programmer), but what understanding I have about empirical studies of software engineering suggests lines of code is more or less the only consistent predictor of defect count.

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#86

Post by synthc »

cyberbanjo wrote: post #51
csbartus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh no, commas are treated as whitespace in clojure. ~ is used for unquote

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#87

Post by dTal »

jolux wrote: post #17
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…

>Why aren't we all writing in APL/K/J if it matters that much? In all seriousness I think writing more code in APL would probably cut down on bugs, but array-oriented languages are so far beyond how most programmers think about programming, and look so obscure, that I don't think there's any hope of them seeing widespread adoption. Most people loathe point-free Haskell, so I can only imagine what they'd think of the…

Not really; a direct descendent of APL is very widely used, and it's called Numpy. It's just that array-orientation, while great (especially for numerics), is insufficiently general to comfortably express arbitrary algorithms. You can write "APL" in many modern languages, but people still prefer to use traditional control flow for many purposes; hell, even APL provides this "escape hatch" (though it looks bolted-on).

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#89

Post by jolux »

dTal wrote: post #87
jolux wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why aren't we all writing in APL/K/J if it matters that much? In all seriousness I think writing more code in APL would probably cut down on bugs, but array-oriented languages are so far beyond how most programmers think about programming, and look so obscure, that I don't think there's any hope of them seeing widespread adoption. Most people loathe point-free Haskell, so I can only imagine what they'd think of the…

Not really; a direct descendent of APL is very widely used, and it's called Numpy. It's just that array-orientation, while great (especially for numerics), is insufficiently general to comfortably express arbitrary algorithms. You can write "APL" in many modern languages, but people still prefer to use traditional control flow for many purposes; hell, even APL provides this "escape hatch" (though it looks bolted-on).

Numpy is definitely not as powerful (read: concise) as APL, and you really can’t write “APL” in most modern languages. The operators are rank-polymorphic, for one.

Re: How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

#90

Post by blandflakes »

sli wrote: post #27
FPGAhacker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was very productive in Clojure for some number of years and never once, not a single time, found benefit in REPL-driven development. I've used it here and there just to test little snippets, but never actually used it for real. Frequently I found it unnecessary, anyway. Clojure just made it way to easy to get things right that I rarely had to dive in and figure out why something was wrong. These days I prefer types…

Totally agree. I found Clojure to be an amazing, well-designed language. I found the REPL to be secondary to really great immutable data structures and pragmatic escape hatches.
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