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Six years of professional Clojure development

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Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#11

Post by joelbluminator »

lukashrb wrote: post #6

Nice article. Sadly a lot of people won't even try clojure since it is dynamic typed. I see their point but nevertheless clojure does something really well here. As the author obserserves designing around some core data structures results in high code reuse. A library like spec is also way better in encoding business requirements than all the mainstream language typesystems e.g. a number in business context has mostl…

I don't think it's about it's dynamicism but more about it being functional. Plenty of super popular dynamic languages out there. I think that's also what keeps elixir from becoming something more mainstream, most people come from OOP and are used to thinking about programming that way.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#12

Post by joelbluminator »

theonething wrote: post #9
atraac wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think JVM is what turns people off. It's a different paradigm. Every FP language is basically a niche these days even though you can hear great things about most of them(Elixir? Elm? Clojure? F#?). It's just that FP is not popular/common enough for these languages to be popularized like some other OO languages.

Elixir seems to be pretty popular here on HN these days.

HN is not a good representation of the programming world at all.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#13

Post by 331c8c71 »

rychco wrote: post #3
tigroferoce wrote: post #2

I also had the privilege to work with clojure for a couple of years on a large project. That was wonderful. Hands down the best language/framework/approach to development I’ve ever had. I still find crazy that it’s not one of the main programming language out there.

Unfortunately, despite consistently hearing about how enjoyable Clojure is, I think many people are turned off by the JVM. This is probably also the problem with Scala, which is apparently also enjoyable to use.

Scala can be enjoyable but can be a major pain as well. Look no further than the de-facto standard build tool (sbt).

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#14

Post by capableweb »

joelbluminator wrote: post #11
lukashrb wrote: post #6

Nice article. Sadly a lot of people won't even try clojure since it is dynamic typed. I see their point but nevertheless clojure does something really well here. As the author obserserves designing around some core data structures results in high code reuse. A library like spec is also way better in encoding business requirements than all the mainstream language typesystems e.g. a number in business context has mostl…

I don't think it's about it's dynamicism but more about it being functional. Plenty of super popular dynamic languages out there. I think that's also what keeps elixir from becoming something more mainstream, most people come from OOP and are used to thinking about programming that way.

Both of you miss the most obvious difference between Clojure and all mainstream languages: it's a lisp.

I've had so many programmers look at code I write and proclaim: "wow that looks impossible because of the parenthesis" and that would never touch anything like it because it seems so different.

Some people do take the time to learn how it works, but many just have a knee-jerk reaction to it and then forget about the language itself.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#15

Post by YuukiRey »

Clojure is the most enjoyable language I've ever used and I love the interactive development. I haven't written code in any other language that even comes close.

Unfortunately I am too lazy and careless to use Clojure in any serious capacity though. I really need a Haskell or Rust compiler to remind me of all my silly mistakes. I can't be trusted to get to the same level of confidence through unit tests or linting or spec or malli.

I actually tried using Clojure for a little web project (~3k LoC in both Haskell and Clojure) and any refactor that included maps that were passed around in many different routes (think authorization, logging, DB) ended up with me chasing down rather weird type errors. Basically the equivalent of can't call X on undefined in JS.

In Haskell I spent at least the same amount of time trying to make various monads play nicely together. Think using IO, Maybe, Either, etc. in the same route handler without having your code be indented ever further to the right.

But the difference is that once I've invested that time I'm very confident in my code, whereas in Clojure there's always this lingering sense of impending doom because surely there's some code path that I haven't thought about.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#16

Post by nonbirithm »

lukashrb wrote: post #6

Nice article. Sadly a lot of people won't even try clojure since it is dynamic typed. I see their point but nevertheless clojure does something really well here. As the author obserserves designing around some core data structures results in high code reuse. A library like spec is also way better in encoding business requirements than all the mainstream language typesystems e.g. a number in business context has mostl…

Can we have a REPL-driven language that's statically typed?

My hope is yes, in that it's just that the work hasn't been put in yet to create to create the equivalent of Typescript for Clojure or Lua that compiles down to the actual, extensible language.

I always wish that it would become unnecessary to have to choose between stability and extensibility when selecting a programming language. Having a Clojure with static types or a typed Lua (Teal) would put us so much closer to that goal.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#17

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

joelbluminator wrote: post #12
theonething wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir seems to be pretty popular here on HN these days.

HN is not a good representation of the programming world at all.

It does tell you what legacy code bases you'll be maintaining in ten years though ;)

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#18

Post by serpix »

rychco wrote: post #3
tigroferoce wrote: post #2

I also had the privilege to work with clojure for a couple of years on a large project. That was wonderful. Hands down the best language/framework/approach to development I’ve ever had. I still find crazy that it’s not one of the main programming language out there.

Unfortunately, despite consistently hearing about how enjoyable Clojure is, I think many people are turned off by the JVM. This is probably also the problem with Scala, which is apparently also enjoyable to use.

as both a Scala and Clojure polyglot I would pick Clojure over Scala every single time, the Clojure REPL development style alone puts Scala behind.

Scala and SBT is a nightmare, I don't want to touch it ever again.

With Clojure you are done before Intellij has even rebuilt your indexes /s.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#19

Post by snotrockets »

rychco wrote: post #3
tigroferoce wrote: post #2

I also had the privilege to work with clojure for a couple of years on a large project. That was wonderful. Hands down the best language/framework/approach to development I’ve ever had. I still find crazy that it’s not one of the main programming language out there.

Unfortunately, despite consistently hearing about how enjoyable Clojure is, I think many people are turned off by the JVM. This is probably also the problem with Scala, which is apparently also enjoyable to use.

The JVM is best in class, and has great ecosystem (with some noteable omissions).

Scala is a different beast: modern Java negates the need for a lot of it, and the community tolerance and support for bigots and abusers justifiably distances many.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#20

Post by joelbluminator »

capableweb wrote: post #14
joelbluminator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's about it's dynamicism but more about it being functional. Plenty of super popular dynamic languages out there. I think that's also what keeps elixir from becoming something more mainstream, most people come from OOP and are used to thinking about programming that way.

Both of you miss the most obvious difference between Clojure and all mainstream languages: it's a lisp. I've had so many programmers look at code I write and proclaim: "wow that looks impossible because of the parenthesis" and that would never touch anything like it because it seems so different. Some people do take the time to learn how it works, but many just have a knee-jerk reaction to it and then forget about th…

Can you blame them though? Look at Python/Ruby where even non developers can sometimes understand the code and then look at some crazy Haskell/Lisp expression.
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