31–40 of 119 posts
Hey OP or mods, could you please update this link Dunno where the staging server came from https://blog.begin.com/posts/2022-01-27-the-boring-technolog...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about hiring though? If you have a vacancy for a Clojure developer, how many applicants could you expect? When it comes to programming languages, I'd stick to the top 10 languages if your company isn't hip enough to attract a certain kind of developer on its own.
On the other hand you attract a certain kind of developer with those roles than generic languages.
Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist. It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time. It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years . There's also very little code churn ins…
How about hiring though? If you have a vacancy for a Clojure developer, how many applicants could you expect? When it comes to programming languages, I'd stick to the top 10 languages if your company isn't hip enough to attract a certain kind of developer on its own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It almost sounds like you don't believe that developers can learn new languages.
The majority of companies want you to be productive on day one.
Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist. It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time. It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years . There's also very little code churn ins…
The cost of innovation is not so much in the core of Clojure itself, but that once your company gets larger, you will want to integrate with more and more things that have not put effort into Clojure compatibility, just because the language is not very popular. Also hiring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd agree that clojure fits the boring tag, and that's a good thing. Unfortunately it's also dying. While many old libraries and tools are stable and functional, nothing new is really being created with it. The same couldn't be said for boring technologies like Java or Python.
What about clojurescript?
Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist. It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time. It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years . There's also very little code churn ins…
How about hiring though? If you have a vacancy for a Clojure developer, how many applicants could you expect? When it comes to programming languages, I'd stick to the top 10 languages if your company isn't hip enough to attract a certain kind of developer on its own.
Clojure devs are much more senior - they've typically been burnt by at least one tech stack, often more (Java, JS + React, Fortran, Cobol, punching tape, etc.). Clojure devs also tend to be really passionate about, you guessed it, Clojure, which commonly turns out to be a good thing. People passionate about that level of language-detail tend to be meticulous about many other useful things, like choosing the right tools and building simple and maintainable applications.
There's sometimes a slight tendency towards over-engineering which is understandable. People who dive deep into other programming languages and go through the pain of learning lisp sometimes tend to lose focus of the actual (business) problem to solve. But I wouldn't say this tendency is significantly higher than elsewhere. Still, sometimes, the pragmatism of a rails dev just churning out code is missed.
Also, because Clojure jobs are scarce and there's a high number of "secret Clojurists" (people who code Clojure at night and secretly dream of using it at their day job), you actually get a much higher number of applicants than you would have estimated based on the most recent Stackoverflow survey.
Also, you get a real shot at hiring rockstar devs. This is huge and cannot be overstated. If you're hiring for a standard JS / Python stack, you're suddenly competing with FAANG companies and their salaries. If you're hiring for Clojure, you're hardly competing with anyone. And you get a good pre-selection of senior devs. Like, those which were burned at a FAANG company, who finally came to their senses and now want to code Clojure. What's not to like?
I guess a drawback would be that you couldn't instantly hire a local team of 100+ devs, even if you take secret Clojurists into account. But who would want to work at a place which hires 100+ devs in a short amount of time?
(I interviewed around 200 people, many of them for Clojure roles, sometimes even comparing Python and Clojure applicants for the same role)
Relevant talk: https://youtu.be/kNiGu_VaoTg?t=1566
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about hiring though? If you have a vacancy for a Clojure developer, how many applicants could you expect? When it comes to programming languages, I'd stick to the top 10 languages if your company isn't hip enough to attract a certain kind of developer on its own.
It almost sounds like you don't believe that developers can learn new languages.
Google were notoriously strict for limiting languages at the start and I think it was very frustrating for some of the developers they hired. If I had a boring technology checklist then "Language we already use" would be top of the list.
So, not ElasticSearch.
What about between 2 boring technologies? For example I’m debating between Eleventy and Hugo (because I know both JS and Go, but not Ruby so I will skip Jekyll)
Before you spend much time on a pure (thus limited) SSG, I recommend taking a close look at https://Remix.run . Remix supports a superset of Eleventy or Hugo (or Jekyll or even NextJS export). It's too new to be considered "boring", but it leverages OG web standards and defaults to web platform-native foundations. Given its provenance and the authors' bona fides, I'm betting heavy it sticks around for the long haul.…
That's what people said for Redwood.js. One year later and it's mostly forgotten.