Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Six years of professional Clojure development

falkoriemenschneider.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 209 posts

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#121

Post by capableweb »

grncdr wrote: post #99
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.

While this made me laugh a bit, I think there's a meaningful difference between using "tree-like" syntax for all your code (lisp & S-expressions) vs declarative UI descriptions (JSX). A deeply nested syntax is beneficial for UI work because you can correlate the structure of the code with the interface/document being rendered. S-expressions for HTML/UI in the form of Hiccup-style templates are equally good (if not be…

> In Lisps, the uniformity makes it harder to quickly distinguish "behaviour" from "data", which is kind of the point, but comes with a trade-off in readability.

Maybe in theory, but in practice it's easy to tell because in the case of hiccup, the data is data (as vectors) and behavior is behavior (as function calls), those have different syntax in Clojure.

Lisps are excellent at manipulating trees, which is exactly what HTML and the DOM is.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#122

Post by thebouv »

clusterhacks wrote: post #119

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…

If I want to learn a new technology, that's been out a while, I make sure to look for jobs for it first. Just a gut check on how many opportunities are out there for it.

This doesn't work for something brand new of course, but I still do a cursory look through job sites to see what I can see.

Like for instance on Dice.com right now there are 60 jobs available. If I were interested in Clojure today and saw that, I probably wouldn't bother because I know Clojure is mature but there's not a market for it apparently.

Again, this isn't meticulous or scientific at all, just a gut check with a few searches.

Then again, Rust only has 13 jobs listed soooooo.....

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#123

Post by afry1 »

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've had some difficulty getting a "basic" web server up and running too. Composing libraries together is a great way to build software, but when you're starting from such a low level with a new language where that kind of development style is the norm, it's a steep initial learning curve.

Have you looked into Luminus? I haven't tried it yet, but it's supposed to be a Rails-like starter kit for web apps: https://luminusweb.com/

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#124

Post by emidln »

clusterhacks wrote: post #119

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…

I posted a couple years ago about my experience finding Clojure jobs in 2018. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075132

I still have about 10 recruiters a week mail me about jobs relating to Clojure (either Clojure roles directly, or someone looking for a "functional" developer for another fringe language). It's unclear how many of these are the same handful of companies cycling recruiters (or with open reqs). At least in Chicago, it seems pretty straight-forward to get a job hacking Clojure if you have prior Clojure experience.

The other alternative is bringing Clojure to an org. You solve problems and a lot of orgs honestly don't care about the details, particularly if you're in a silo or one of the only devs. This is harder to do in an established org that already has templates for specific things, unless that org is big into containers or microservices already. I've never been hired for a full-time job as a Clojure developer (although I've had offers), but I've put Clojure into production across three organizations.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#125

Post by clartaq »

iainctduncan wrote: post #110
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…

Curious, because I'm also doing Scheme now, and Clojure was my gateway drug, which Scheme are you using and for what sort of problem? I'm using s7, but that's because my use case is very much oriented to s7's non-typical feature set (it's computer music), but Janet looks really nice too. (Many similarities to both Clojure and s7 actually).

Mostly Chez. Racket is remarkable too -- I have never felt that I was stretching its capabilities. Enjoying Janet, trying to get over Clojure habits where the two differ.

Most of my career has been involved in medical diagnostic, data analysis, and desktop applications. Hobby projects include text processing, editors, outliners, wikis, and knowledge management.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#126

Post by jeofken »

cies wrote: post #82
jeofken wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In real life projects, you end up doing type checking at runtime, meaning you also need a test for the code path

Exactly! More developer discipline required. What ever can be checked by the compiler, as part of the language, is automatic free productivity to me.

The counter argument is that in clojure you can do (merge {:a 1} {:b “yo”}) without defining new types.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#127

Post by kazinator »

grncdr wrote: post #99
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.

While this made me laugh a bit, I think there's a meaningful difference between using "tree-like" syntax for all your code (lisp & S-expressions) vs declarative UI descriptions (JSX). A deeply nested syntax is beneficial for UI work because you can correlate the structure of the code with the interface/document being rendered. S-expressions for HTML/UI in the form of Hiccup-style templates are equally good (if not be…

> you can correlate the structure of the code with the interface/document being rendered

Note that you're taking for granted that the document must necessarily be a nested tree structure, which then behooves us to follow in the code.

Which may be right and good (and in any case is foisted on us); but the assumption bears spelling out.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#128

Post by YuukiRey »

slifin wrote: post #103
YuukiRey wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use kondo already, and while it's a nice tool it doesn't solve my problems.

Can you be more specific? There is a primitive type annotation checking system in there, kinds of mistakes not being caught will likely be of interest to Borkdude and others

The features of the Rust and Haskell type systems that are most useful to me are requiring me to handle every possible null value and modeling branching control flow with algebraic data types, including exhaustiveness checks for those.

A value of type "User" can be either "LoggedInUser", "Admin" or "NotLoggedIn", and each of those can have data attached to it. Now I can write functions that only work on specific versions of this and the compiler will remind me to handle every possible variation. If I've narrowed it down to "this function only takes Admin", then the compiler will prevent me from passing the wrong type to it.

It's little things like being able to wrap a "String" in a so-called "newtype": "newtype SpecialString = SpecialString String". Now a function can happily accept three string arguments, but if each one is wrapped in a special type you can't mix them up. Or saying something is a "NonEmptyList" and now I can rest assured that it'll always have values.

If any of these can be achieved reliably (<-- important!) in Clojure then I apologize for my lack of knowledge!

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#129

Post by jeofken »

cutler wrote: post #67
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…

So what is your preferred alternative/language/framework?

TypeScript+immutable is like typed clojure without S-expressions but with async io, so that is nice. Haven’t found a way to get eval-expr-at-point for js though. This is my choice for writing back ends today, but I also do Clojure jobs.

I program compilers nowadays, and do so in OCaml, which is blocking IO, mutable data, and no sexpr, but the type system makes changing code easy. For the domain of compilers, there isn’t much IO anyways.

Re: Six years of professional Clojure development

#130

Post by pjmlp »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #96
pjmlp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing else that gets close to the world promised to us by Xerox PARC. Don't blame Java for the issues that are Clojure's fault. The only Lisps that can match such tooling are Allegro and LispWorks.

Well, I owned a Xerox Lisp Machine from 1982 to about 1987. True, a great programming environment, but the situation is so much better today. For example, I own a LispWorks Professional license, and the support and quality of the product is fantastic. My friends at Franz have similar quality products like Allegro and AllegroGraph. Even Clojure+Cider or Haskell+Intero or Haskell+VSCode (easiest to set up) is arguably…

Yeah, let me take the opporunity to thank you for the books.
Post reply on HN