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(next Rich)

clojure.org

111–120 of 158 posts

Re: (next Rich)

#111
I look in envy at what Rich has achieved. I think we all have ideas of how we would like a language to be, but actually sitting down and doing it to Rich's extent is something else.

As a schemer there are so many small things I would like to change that put me off using it for my personal projects, but regardless I have really enjoyed contributing to other people's Clojure projects. It is not far away from what I would consider a good starting position for my own perfect language.

Re: (next Rich)

#112

Rich has to be my favorite thinker in this space, absolutely love his talks and the way he articulates things, and I often draw from his philosophies in my work But, I've always been turned off to Clojure by the lack of static typing (I know spec exists, but it's not really the same thing). I did a little project once to try it out, and even there I found myself spending time debugging basic issues like passing the w…

It is difficult to explain why, but there is actually a positive case to be made for dynamic typing. Their benefits are real but a lot less immediately apparent than the benefits of static typing. I think this article from Eric Normand captured some of it https://ericnormand.me/article/clojure-and-types. In my opinion languages like TypeScript where the type system is only a verification system and has no effect on the runtime, combined with its emphasis on structural types, existence of union/intersection types, etc, go a long way towards reducing the downsides of static types but not completely.

Re: (next Rich)

#113
Your work on Clojure and other projects has been truly influential, and your talks are some of the best out there. I remember watching your "Simple Made Easy" presentation and being blown away.

The impact of Clojure cannot be overstated. It's amazing to see how far it has come since its inception. You've inspired so many developers, including myself, to explore functional programming and think differently about software design.

Re: (next Rich)

#115
Rich presented Clojure to our local software development group in 2008, I've been working with Clojure (both as a hobbyist and eventually professionally) ever since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGVqrGmwOAw

At that time I had been working with Java for years, both the conciseness of the code and the interactivity were flat-out amazing to me. It's saved me time and made me 100 times more productive.

Congratulations to Rich, I am also extremely grateful for his work!

Re: (next Rich)

#117
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you had to switch to C++ because Clojure / Java wasn't performant enough?

> because Clojure / Java wasn't performant enough Languages aren't "performant". You can write good or bad code in most languages, or code that isn't a good fit for a language. That said, there are languages which will make you incur certain penalties, as there is a price to be paid for automatic memory management with garbage collection, for example. These penalties generally do not matter except for edge cases (and…

There is “the expected performance of idiomatic code”, though, which is what most people mean when they talk about the performance of a language.

Re: (next Rich)

#118
post #92

I wrote my first trading system in Clojure because a few of the libraries we relied on were in java. It was 2011 and I'd had about 3 years of lisp experience. I got a bit of side eye from people when I told them I was using a relatively new programming language but the fact that it was based on the JVM, which alot of HFT firms were using helped make the case. We didn't use if for more than a few years before it was r…

> you'll know just how slow memory allocation is Just a small nitpick, but allocation is definitely not slow in case of the JVM, it is often faster than manually managed languages. It is a pointer bump only. All the necessary mechanisms of a GC does have an overhead, so your point stands, but not for the mentioned reason.

Ok sure that’s fair.

Typically in HFT We just want to avoid any full sweep garbage collection between 8am and 6pm

Re: (next Rich)

#119
I’ll always have a soft spot for Clojure. It’s the only Lisp I’ve been paid to write applications in. Naturally I’ve written plenty of Elisp. I also use SBCL for personal scripts and data exploration, but that’s always been in support of delivering a solution in some other language.

While, as is to be expected, I don’t agree with every decision made for Clojure, I find it to be an entirely pleasant Lisp to work with.

So, kudos to Mr. Hickey, and thanks for sneaking Lisp back into corporate America!

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