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Try Clojure

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Re: Try Clojure

#71

Post by ARandomerDude »

crispyambulance wrote: post #35
d4mi3n wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the subsets of the community around clojure were one of the biggest problem with it. It's gotten better over the years, but circa 2016 - 2018 it had a spike in popularity despite being very hostile to newcomers. There was an almost apologist attitude towards rough edges or failure modes folks new to the community would fall into. I managed to work with it for a time despite that, but it left me with…

> ...had a spike in popularity despite being very hostile to newcomers. To be fair the community itself, as humans, was very welcoming to newcomers. Really super nice and helpful folks. If anything was "hostile" it was the dominance of emacs and very limited options for other tooling. That, and the horrifically unhelpful leaky abstractions in the stack trace when something went wrong. It's a big step, if you don't al…

clojure-lsp and clj-kondo work with any editor and are both excellent.

https://github.com/clojure-lsp/clojure-lsp

https://github.com/clj-kondo/clj-kondo

I've always used (Neo)Vim with Clojure.

Re: Try Clojure

#72

Post by grumpyprole »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #56
drpossum wrote: post #4

I love clojure, but it's really lost a lot of the momentum it had as many imperative languages have adopted parts of functional programming (and much for the better) over the last many years. On the other side I've felt a lot of the ecosystem work that was done has a more "timeless" quality. Coupled with java interop I haven't ever felt wanting when I do reach for it for some hobby projects I keep up with. One thing…

> many imperative languages have adopted parts of functional programming nailed it. I don't know much about functional languages other than a haskell course back in the day, but I don't want to do functional all the time. It plays great in some situations and I am happy to use those language subsets in my daily coding, but I don't need my entire application to be written in an esoteric language

This is of course a popular opinion and pretty much the C++ philosophy. Unfortunately a lot of the benefits of functional programming cannot be fully realised unless you are "all in". The paper "The Curse of the Excluded Middle" is somewhat blunt but it makes some good points: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2611829

Re: Try Clojure

#73

Post by bunderbunder »

systems wrote: post #62
bunderbunder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair. I don't mind dynamic typing so much, but I agree that getting clever with automatic type conversion is just plain wat. (reference to: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat )

I wouldnt call that getting clever, its just a string of what you did > (type (+ 1 2 '(1 2))) #object[String]

The problem is how you get there.

1 and 2 are integers. '(1 2) is a list. None of them are strings, but + helpfully converts them to strings because ClojureScript is leaking some of JavaScript's wat behavior.

Re: Try Clojure

#74

Post by talkingtab »

I know many people will have problems with this post, but I am posting as information for clorjure-ophiles. Not reasons, but personal reasons why I don't do Clojure and will not try it.

1. When I read about Clojure (repeatedly) I like it. I am especially interested in transducers. I even built a half baked transducer engine in JavaScript using generators. There is clearly something here of value here. Any system that can produce transducers is worth learning.

2. I spent too many years of my life on Java. It was okay until someone wrote a thing in php (!!) in a day that would be have taken at least a month in Java. Maybe two. I understand the "good" of Java, but for me personally, the cost of that good is just incredible tedium. This is personal and I understand that.

3. However, as soon as I get to the part of installing Clojure where you install a JVM, I start hearing voices that say "It ain't me babe" and "Just say no to Java". PTSD?

For a while there was Clojure-script and I started working with that, but it seemed to fall off the edge of the world.

I will happily try Clojure again if it will compile itself or if it does not require the installation of a JVM. [ And last but not least of irrational reactions- anything associated with Oracle is to be avoided like the plague. sorry]

[Edit: then I saw the stuff about Babashka so I will give that a try]

Re: Try Clojure

#76

Post by ekzy »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #48

I'm happy with TypeScript, Go, and Rust. Don't feel like learning anything else.

Then… don’t? No ones is forcing you to try it or even to comment with your close-minded opinion. What does this comment bring to the conversation?

Re: Try Clojure

#77

Post by phendrenad2 »

Is there a version of Clojure that compiles to LLVM or something? Sort of like what Scala-native was supposed to be (but never materialized). I like functional programming but I can't abide the Java ecosystem in 2024, it's just too archaic for my taste.

Re: Try Clojure

#78

Post by neilyio »

masspro wrote: post #40

My Clojure experience was that basic dev experience things were shockingly behind where any other moderately popular lang is at. It's been some time though so all I remember clearly is bad error output. Stack traces are hard to read unless you install $random_lib. But worse than stack traces are type errors/"Java errors": if you give the wrong args to a function, the error output is completely inscrutable, generally…

I'm an advocate for Clojure, and while I believe that the usability speed bumps are more than made up for, I completely agree with you. The awkwardness of Clojure's errors, REPL experience, and build tooling is a dealbreaker for many.

A couple years with Rust has taught me that intuitive errors and tooling will funnel you far enough into language to get you productive, and then you're much more likely to stay. There's just no way I would have stayed long enough to be a Rust professional if it hadn't been for cargo and rust-analyzer.

These "non-language" components of Clojure are just not easy enough to use, and its inhibited Clojure's growth. If, however, you do put in the time to grok these parts, the joy of using the language itself never fades.

Re: Try Clojure

#79

Post by nine_k »

jakebasile wrote: post #67

I'm glad this is back. A version of this existed in the ancient past and helped encourage me to try Clojure which ended up being by far the most impactful decision in my professional life. It went away for a while for reasons I'm unclear on. I use Clojure nearly daily at my job and at home. Sometimes it's standard Clojure, sometimes it's the excellent Babashka flavor which I use as a make-like task runner and Zsh-lik…

As a side note, I'm always amazed by people who can use a highly expressive language (Clojure, Rust, even TS) but switch to Go when they feel like it (especially pre-1.18).

To me, switching to a less expressive language is painful and infuriating. I remember having to switch from Python to Java 5, and how everything started to take 3 to 5 times longer code to express.

Maybe the key thing is to only write small things in less expressive languages, like shell scripts, or small C functions to help performance or FFI, or, well, tiny Go utilities.

Re: Try Clojure

#80

Post by default-kramer »

talkingtab wrote: post #74

I know many people will have problems with this post, but I am posting as information for clorjure-ophiles. Not reasons, but personal reasons why I don't do Clojure and will not try it. 1. When I read about Clojure (repeatedly) I like it. I am especially interested in transducers. I even built a half baked transducer engine in JavaScript using generators. There is clearly something here of value here. Any system that…

> It was okay until someone wrote a thing in php (!!) in a day that would be have taken at least a month in Java. Maybe two. I understand the "good" of Java, but for me personally, the cost of that good is just incredible tedium. This is personal and I understand that.

You understand that this has everything to do with Java and nothing to do with the JVM, right?

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