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Six years of professional Clojure development

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Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#111

Post by iainctduncan »

stanislavb wrote: post #8
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.

According to LibHunt's popularity index, it's the 28th most popular language https://www.libhunt.com/index#clojure (ahead of Elixir that is 40th). It is less than 50th position on Tiobe's index https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ (which is a bit more reputable than LibHunt's)

Yeah but does any programmer actually believe these indices? I have yet to see one with a prelude where they defined "popular" in a way that would make anyone with a passing knowledge of stats happy.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#112

Post by blunte »

I really enjoy the language and even the look of it, and I have tried several times to use it.

For "simple" scripts or server processes that you might call from cron, it was fine. But for web development, it was always so hard to get up and running - get everything configured and then know how to do things - that I always gave up. The Clojure community really values choosing libraries and tools and seems to echew Rails-like approaches. That's good if you know what you're doing, but it makes the cost of entry really high. And for better or worse, Ruby is a pretty nice language and Rails is pretty easy to get rolling with... so it's very difficult to justify the effort of switching. I want to... I really do. But at this point, unless I work for a shop like TFA, it will just never happen for me.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#113

Post by mumblemumble »

draklor40 wrote: post #106
mumblemumble wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you will end up not setting keys /entries in maps This is what I run into. But that's not exactly a dynamic language problem. It's more of a data-oriented programming (in the Clojure sense) problem. I'm coming to the opinion that data-oriented programming techniques only make sense inside a fairly tightly bounded context. One that's small enough that you can see and understand the whole thing at once. As soon as yo…

> This is what I run into. But that's not exactly a dynamic language problem. It's more of a data-oriented programming (in the Clojure sense) problem. Yes, all dynamic languages have this problem. I have transitioned to statically typed languages and it has been very peaceful so far :)

To go at it from another angle: I'm working in a relatively large Java codebase that also likes to pass around generic ad-hoc data-structures such as maps. And I'm having exactly the same problem problems there. Static typing does nothing to help the situation.

I realize that data-oriented programming is more likely to happen in dynamic languages. But correlation is not causation.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#114

Post by Syzygies »

clartaq wrote: post #95

I've used Clojure for going on 10 years now and it has been one of the most enjoyable programming languages I've ever used. But I've gone back to Scheme for a few ridiculous reasons. 1. TCO. Using `recur` in Clojure just breaks my thought process. 2. Difficulty in getting down to the metal when needed. Using JNI is painful. In Scheme, when needed, the FFI usually handles plain old C. Much easier in my opinion. 3. Com…

Yes. Chez Scheme in particular is a remarkable implementation. Idris 2 for example (a leaner, dependently typed relative of Haskell) relies on Chez Scheme.

As a mathematician I don't need a large ecosystem of other people's work. What keeps drawing me back to Haskell is the experience of reasoning about code paradigms as if they are a branch of algebra (not everyone appreciates algebra, but those who do can never turn around), and a support for parallel code that is decades ahead of any other language I have tried.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#115

Post by yogthos »

draklor40 wrote: post #81
yogthos wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team structures projects by breaking things up into small isolated components that can be reasoned about independently. We'll often do it at the level of namespaces, where a namespace will describe a particular workflow or data transformation, and namespaces tend to be 500 lines or less. It's a similar idea to microservice architecture without the overhead of having to actually split the application up into separa…

``` breaking things up into small isolated components that can be reasoned about independently ``` - This is insufficient for the same reasons unit tests are not enough and you also need integration tests. The moment you cross namespace boundaries, you will end up not setting keys /entries in maps , missing logic etc and end up needing something like Spec/Schema....

Sure, and my team uses Spec at component boundaries to define APIs for that reason. I actually prefer this approach to static typing because it makes it possible to add a specification at the level where it provides the most value, and it's much easier to express semantic constraints using this approach.

It does take more discipline to work with a dynamic language, but once you develop a process then it can be very effective. It's also worth noting that immutable by default plays a huge role here. With Clojure it's natural to create truly isolated components while it takes a lot more discipline in an imperative language where things are passed by reference creating implicit coupling.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#116

Post by regularfry »

W4ldi wrote: post #52
regularfry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've seen 300+ line react components marching off the right of the screen, you'll know that maintaining the parse tree in your head isn't a barrier to popularity.

300+ line components are not popular

Not with me they're not, no.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#117

Post by claytn »

blunte wrote: post #112

I really enjoy the language and even the look of it, and I have tried several times to use it. For "simple" scripts or server processes that you might call from cron, it was fine. But for web development, it was always so hard to get up and running - get everything configured and then know how to do things - that I always gave up. The Clojure community really values choosing libraries and tools and seems to echew Rai…

I agree. I love using the language for smaller things, but since I don't use it at my day job it's really hard to get well acquainted with the common tooling/libraries. When I try starting a new project I always end up spending hours just getting my environment in a good state.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#118

Post by valbaca »

cies wrote: post #33
jeofken wrote: post #22

I loved clojure until working with it for a few years, with some of the famous best teams in Europe and America, including Cognitect people, who ill leave unnamed here. I fell out of love when I realised what the language is - a mutable, imperative, blocking IO by default language with lambdas and zero guarantees at compile time. Effects happen at any time, as it is an imperative language. Just like JS with a better…

I really like Clojure and I'm glad it is around, but I'll prefer something with strong types any day. From the article I see a lot f reasons why: > "Don't break things!" is part of the culture. If you cannot have compile time guarantees on correctness, the discipline to not break things becomes a key feature. On the other hand, if you have strong correctness guarantees, you may more easily incur some breakage (and th…

> Again: I like the language a lot. I also like Ruby a lot. But when a new project with serious complexity requires me to pick language I go with something that has: no implicit nulls, strong type safety, sum types, exhaustivity checks.

Which language is that?

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#119

Post by clusterhacks »

Finding staff is an interesting negative of Clojure to mention.

I searched for a Clojure job off-and-on for several years in the 2012-2018 timeframe. I had attended the very first Clojure/conj in 2010 and had development projects in production very soon after that - so I had some Clojure specific experience and was otherwise a reasonable candidate.

My opinion was that there were far fewer opportunities than the inner core of the Clojure dev world admitted. This opinion seems very much not shared or mentioned by others. I also think that Clojure opportunities seem more limited now than a few years ago - Clojure seems to have become one of those programming languages listed on job descriptions but Clojure isn't actually part of the job.

Never getting an offer from a Clojure-oriented job was kind of weird to me at the time because I did get lots of interviews outside of the Clojure world and pretty regular job offers from those. I never figured out why I couldn't catch an offer from a Clojure dev org.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#120

Post by fnord123 »

slifin wrote: post #91
fnord123 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both wrong. If it was dynamicism then why are JS, Python, and Ruby so popular? If it's about being functional then why has Scala got more users? Languages are driven by the platform. There is no Clojure platform that people want to use, so no one uses Clojure. If a language isn't bound to it's own platform, it can share a platform and displace other tools like python, go, and rust do with C and C++ (docker is…

Compile that same app with graalvm native and you'll get near instant hello world If you don't want to have to manually compile your app then you can use https://babashka.org/ How many platforms do you think Clojure has?

> Compile that same app with graalvm native and you'll get near instant hello world

Could you show me how?

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