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I don’t know if it’s dead or not, as I’m sure people still love to use it… it just doesn’t have any major upside that’d make me want to adopt it.
Rust, as you’ve mentioned, is the opposite… huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt, so no surprise it’s getting more talk these days.
I am learning Clojure right now and I can relate to the feeling of not wanting to put time and effort into it if there is no marketable value in return. One thing that is motivating me is I read an article about how niche languages can be lucrative. (I want to say that article was here on HN but too lazy right now to search for it). The other thing that is motivating me is that this type of programming and thinking i…
I’m going to be a contrarian here: the answer is yes. Yes there commercial jobs out there, yes there are big names that use it, but it’s an increasingly insular community, it’s ceased growing, a lot of people have moved on, and it never really found a niche. Established programming languages never “die” in the sense of dropping to zero, but to the extent that the question is meaningful, Clojure’s dead.
Closure is weird if you’re not already into lisps (I know, I know our fathers’ parentheses). It’s not easy to just pick up and start solving problems, because everything feels foreign. I don’t know if it’s dead or not, as I’m sure people still love to use it… it just doesn’t have any major upside that’d make me want to adopt it. Rust, as you’ve mentioned, is the opposite… huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt,…
> [Rust has] huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt
Probably this depends wildly on the person, but I found the opposite to be true.
I had bunch of languages under my belt before I learned Clojure, but none of them functional nor s-expressions, so Clojure was very different than the ones I knew. Took some while to get used to, but after a couple of months I was more efficient than I ever was in any other language.
On the other hand, Rust took longer time to be as efficient as other languages I knew, even though it was on the surface more similar to what I knew since before.
So for me personally, it was easier to become efficient with Clojure, even with 0 experience with lisps or the JVM, compared to Rust. I think it's mostly about the surface-area of what you can learn to become efficient. Once you understand s-expressions, there is not much to Clojure, besides memorizing various APIs, but that's easy. With Rust, there is so much syntax to remember, and other rules to follow, while in Clojure the syntax is really simple, so once you get it, you will never fight with what the right syntax is again.
I am learning Clojure right now and I can relate to the feeling of not wanting to put time and effort into it if there is no marketable value in return. One thing that is motivating me is I read an article about how niche languages can be lucrative. (I want to say that article was here on HN but too lazy right now to search for it). The other thing that is motivating me is that this type of programming and thinking i…
Forgive my ignorance but what is a PT and FT job?
Here is the Google Trends Comparison of Clojure, F#, Rust and Scala. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=IN&q=%2Fm%2F03y... Rust is 4-5 times more popular in searches that Clojure and F#. Interestingly Scala is around 3 times more popular than Rust in searches.
One benefit of learning functional languages, whether Haskell or Clojure, is that it makes you a better developer in other, non-functional, languages.
When I think of how the java streams API is used, it generates lots of garbage (i.e. lots of intermediary allocs), doesn't always make things clearer.. i'm genuinely curious (and in fact i like the streams API, it's just often misused by collecting at the wrong step..).
Clojure is not dead, the core language is still very strong, but the dev experience has been degrading IME. This is due to a lack of heavy corporate backing and investment, probably by choice. Taking a PL to the mainstream is very expensive. You cannot compare Clojure and Rust in any way as they're completely different design philosophies.
That's actually why it is interesting to compare them. Comparing things that are the same would quickly become very boring.
Clojure is not dead, the core language is still very strong, but the dev experience has been degrading IME. This is due to a lack of heavy corporate backing and investment, probably by choice. Taking a PL to the mainstream is very expensive. You cannot compare Clojure and Rust in any way as they're completely different design philosophies.
Do you just mean that things are improving less quickly than they are for, e.g., Typescript?