111–120 of 145 posts
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This is the same setup also I've been failing to reproduce.
Are you using shadow-cljs?
Clojure will not die for now, for the same reason that it remains nieche - it's a lisp. Arguably the only viable full stack web dev lisp. And lispers gonna lisp. If that speaks to you on a philosophical/aesthetic level then go for it, you will be in good company.
If you want to try to time the hype market then truly best of luck. However, I think choosing to invest in a language that works for you and your way of thinking will be a less fragile strategy.
I'll keep Clojuring for a while at least, because it's a pleasure. Because it lets me reason where other languages would have me memorise. I find memorising syntax tedious. It's not a silver bullet of course - some things just make more sense for to do in a c/rust type procedural language.
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I also worked this way, I've had REPL sessions that ran for months, but IMO this is a workaround rather than a real solution. It's a good workaround, but fast startup would be a game changer. If Clojure would start fast enough, projects like Babashka would not be needed.
It's not a workaround. It's how Clojure is designed, around its REPL, intended for interactive development at its core. Start a REPL, connect your editor, develop. You can start your apps in the REPL (from RCFs in your code -- Rich Comment Forms) and never type into the REPL. You can grow the application while it is running, you can run tests via the REPL from your editor. That interactive approach -- working on your…
What I am saying is that Clojure's long startup time is still annoying if you want to restart, for example if you trashed your repl session or want to start with a clean slate.
If Clojure would start fast enough it could also be used for CLI scripts and we would not need Babashka at all.
All in all, I think Clojure is a great language, but the slow startup time is still a disadvantage.
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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.
Everyone can join the Clojurians slack, it is a very welcoming place, also to newcomers, in my experience.
Everyone can create issues and patches, getting them accepted may take a long time, but the core team does a great job of maintaining high quality and not breaking things.
I find this hard to believe. I believe you that you haven't see much about Clojure over past 2 years of so. But the cause might be that you simply haven't looked at Clojure in the past 2 years of so. OTOH, I've seen plenty of Clojure in the same 2 years. Perhaps most of news/fuzz is about Rust, but I haven't seen much of that, since I'm not following the news sources that talk about that. In the end, it depends what…
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…
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Similar experience here. My first Clojure(script) projects used leiningen, now everything is deps.edn and the clojure CLI. Cool, changes happen. But editor integration, REPL tooling, even which compiler to use, etc are not consistent either. The tooling is changing everywhere and bit rot has claimed almost all of my past projects. The code is still 100% compatible but the build system is just broken. I've given up tr…
Perhaps this is due to how much effort folks want to invest in hobby projects? (that's a broad question aimed at several folks here) At work, we have a codebase of over 142K lines of Clojure, some of which dates back over a decade. We started with Leiningen (because it was the only game in town). We migrated to Boot in 2015 because we needed easier customization of our dev/test/build pipeline and Boot's "tasks" were…
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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 s…
I also find that having everything operate on a common set of data structures makes it very easy to build data processing pipelines. If I use a library, I just have to know what data it takes as an input and what it produces as its output. The data is transparent and inert. I don't need to know anything about the internals of the library worry about any special behaviors.
On the other hand, if I'm working with OO based language, then library APIs are object graphs, and objects are opaque and volatile. I now have to worry about the behaviors of each individual object in the graph, and their state.
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?
In my small experience, I've been using Clojure for nearly 4 years to implement real-time ML pipelines.
Having writing Clojure daily for nearly 4 years, my experience fully confirms that survey.
I also noticed the apparent silence around Clojure and its community, which looks like a paradox to me [2]. The Clojure community is actually active and very supportive (the Clojurians channel on Slack incredibly helpful) but it's also very much low profile.
Rich Hickey created Clojure as an independent developer and without extra funding. He's a great speaker, but likely didn't benefit from all the marketing channels available to more popular languages designed in more corporate enviroments, such as Rust and Go.
Being a LISP dialect, Clojure is also quite niche (not the first language you'd learn at school/uni) and definitely not academic, but extremely pragmatical.
Learning Clojure was quite mind bending at first, and I often wondered by my more experienced colleagues kept saying how expressive it is. I now see their point, and get paid quite well for having spent time learning it.
[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/
[2] https://piero.github.io/stories/2022/06/23/the-clojure-parad...