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Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

#101

Post by yogthos »

bjourne wrote: post #35

Clojure is a wonderful language, but not so wonderful that I can tolerate its slow startup and compile times. I think lots of developers think the same way. Imo any language nit facilitating fast startup and compile is stillborn. Imo the same goes for any language requiring you to setup a "project" or something to get started.

Babashka is an excellent Clojure runtime with fast startup that I use for all my scripting needs nowadays. Best part is that you can develop with it interactively via nREPL just like regular Clojure. You just run bb --nrepl-server and connect your editor to it.

https://babashka.org/

Re: Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

#102

Post by filoeleven »

yogthos wrote: post #100
bsder wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clojure has probably had its heyday, but it's quite far from dead. The main issue is that there are other JVM languages nowadays that don't suck--that wasn't the case back in 2009. So, if you wanted the Java ecosystem but didn't want Java, your choices were quite limited. You had Scala (just ... no) and Groovy (oh, hell, no) and ... Clojure. Since then, Java, itself, has gotten a lot better, and there have become a p…

Thing is that Clojure is a very different language from Java in pretty much every way. People who use Clojure are typically drawn to it because it's a Lisp and facilitates interactive development. I highly doubt that it's popularity is significantly affected by languages like Kotlin that try to be a better Java. If you're looking for a Lisp that you can use in production then Clojure is your best bet. This is the sel…

Clojure being a lisp on the JVM is was what first drew me to try it out. Clojure being immutable-first, data-oriented, and having a core library based largely on the seq abstraction was what hooked me.

The lisp REPL benefits are wonderful, and I miss them all the time in other languages, but I also miss the overall design philosophy equally as much. Value-based data structures with atomic updates where necessary is something that ought to be the default for our industry. Give it another 40 years to settle, I guess.

Re: Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

#103

Post by nextos »

eggsyntax wrote: post #48

I can say that I (like many others) have built a thriving career on Clojure. I like to change jobs every couple of years, and I've never yet had any trouble finding a Clojure job I'm excited about (and I only consider well-paid remote jobs with friendly teams with companies doing something I feel good about). The community is mostly active on the Clojurians slack (currently ~24,000 users) and clojureverse.org. So --…

What domains are you using Clojure in?

Re: Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

#104

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

kovrik wrote: post #96
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #60

I moved away from Clojure to Common Lisp. The Clojure culture doesn't take seriously developer experience, good documentation, easy getting started pages etc. Plus you have to deal with the JVM and slow compile cycles. Compared to that Steel Bank Common Lisp is rock solid and just works. Even the libraries and documentation are fewer but better. I did learn a lot from watching Rich Hickey's talks so there's that.

Really? I have the opposite experience. I _want_ to love CL but Clojure wins when it comes to IDE support and libs and documentation. Maybe it's just me but I find (SB)CL tooling to be very obscure: ASDF, QuickLisp, Roswell etc. My main issue with it is that it's all written in CL itself and doesn't provide handy CLI tools to execute common tasks (compile app, build package, run tests, deploy etc.). Not to mention th…

ros init and ros build should be everything. And emacs for the tooling. Quicklisp for dependency management. Having said that even CL is not perfect. Something like https://fresh.deno.dev/ is so much better when it comes to presentation and ease of use.

Re: Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

#105

Post by hedgehog0 »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #60

I moved away from Clojure to Common Lisp. The Clojure culture doesn't take seriously developer experience, good documentation, easy getting started pages etc. Plus you have to deal with the JVM and slow compile cycles. Compared to that Steel Bank Common Lisp is rock solid and just works. Even the libraries and documentation are fewer but better. I did learn a lot from watching Rich Hickey's talks so there's that.

I use CL and am currently learning Clojure. I think there are generally more libraries for Clojure and better communities (in some way). Maybe it's due to the JVM, I dunno.

Re: Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

#106

Post by Jeaye »

Clojure is not dead. As a measure of community, the Slack workspace has around 25k members in it right now.

Even more, Clojure lives on through its various dialects: ClojureScript (JS), Clojure CLR, Clojerl (Erlang), Fennel (Lua), jank (LLVM C++), Ferret (LLVM C++), Babashka, Squint, and so on.

Definitely worth learning, as it will expand your mind; Rich Hickey's talks are some of the most influential I've ever seen.

Re: Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

#107

Post by johannboehme »

moomin wrote: post #19

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.

clojure adoption is slow but still increasing. If you go by this logic any language that isn't the current most trending one is dead. Clojure has it's niche as immutable lisp. That itself has not the broadest appeal but thats ok.

Re: Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

#108

Post by johannboehme »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #60

I moved away from Clojure to Common Lisp. The Clojure culture doesn't take seriously developer experience, good documentation, easy getting started pages etc. Plus you have to deal with the JVM and slow compile cycles. Compared to that Steel Bank Common Lisp is rock solid and just works. Even the libraries and documentation are fewer but better. I did learn a lot from watching Rich Hickey's talks so there's that.

Just to leave some hints for people. - If you don't want to deal with the JVM, Clojure also runs on the Web and .NET. - If you develop with the REPL you don't have compile cycles - Or just use Babashka (no compilation needed)

Re: Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

#109

Post by joeevans1000 »

ironmagma wrote: post #52
sgt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of living languages are based around insular communities. Clojure just fits a niche (people who want a general purpose LISP on the JVM), that's all. I can't be sure though since I am not a Clojure developer.

Clojure goes out of its way to be insular. Creating a PR upstream requires you to have been given access explicitly from Rich Hickey (or whoever admins their Gitlab instance). The Clojurians slack is invite-only. etc.

The Clojurians slack is... invite only? Not now, not ever. There's some kind of slack boilerplate sign up thing but it's the same as all Slack channels.
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