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I quit my job to work on my programming language

jank-lang.org

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Re: I quit my job to work on my programming language

#21

Post by Jeaye »

eduction wrote: post #8

> I get DMs, emails, etc regularly with people asking if jank is ready for them to use. I've spoken with founders and tech leads of dozens of companies, at various Clojure conferences and meet ups, who are interested in using jank to solve performance, efficiency, usability, or interop problems with Clojure. I’d be very curious how much interest is people looking to move to a Clojure from non Clojure code, and in tho…

So far, almost all interest comes from within the Clojure community. Getting people from outside of Clojure requires a lot of education around Lisps, FP, data-oriented programming, interactive programming, etc. It's a whole paradigm shift. I will tackle that, but I'm starting within the Clojure community first.

Mainly, the people interested in jank are the same folks interested in making Graal native images from their uberjars, combined with the folks interested in using some native lib from their Clojure code, combined with people who use Clojure reluctantly because they don't like the JVM. jank is significantly lighter, faster to start up, and has competitive runtime performance compared to the JVM.

Clojure is fast because of the JVM, not because it's a great compiler/runtime. jank is fast because of LLVM, yes, but also because a lot of work is going into the compiler/runtime to make it fast.

Re: I quit my job to work on my programming language

#22

Post by pbronez »

jonas21 wrote: post #18
karmakaze wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like CockroachDB? Such names are memorable--you've already memorized it.

Cockroaches may be gross, but they have the property that they can survive almost anything -- which is of course what you want from a distributed, fault-tolerant database. As far as I know, "jank" only has negative connotations, and a quick glance at the website did not provide an alternate interpretation of the name. Also, if the author is looking for sponsors, some companies might be reluctant to be a proud sponsor…

Can’t one “juke and jank” as you “zig and zag”?

Re: I quit my job to work on my programming language

#23

Post by [deleted] »

Jeaye wrote: post #20
wruza wrote: post #15

I rewrote jank several times, during these eight years, with a different design each time, trying to find something which felt right. I wanted something I'll be blunt here, I see it as just a proloned phase. You wanted something , we all wanted that something at some point. You're not the only one who sees problems and thinks "it could be done differently, if", that's why you gather auditory. You'll end up realizing…

Thanks for taking the time to write all of your thoughts on this. Have a good one!

[deleted]

Re: I quit my job to work on my programming language

#24

Post by tengbretson »

wruza wrote: post #15

I rewrote jank several times, during these eight years, with a different design each time, trying to find something which felt right. I wanted something I'll be blunt here, I see it as just a proloned phase. You wanted something , we all wanted that something at some point. You're not the only one who sees problems and thinks "it could be done differently, if", that's why you gather auditory. You'll end up realizing…

You're probably right but I'm also glad you're not friends with Rich Hickey.

Re: I quit my job to work on my programming language

#27

Post by Jeaye »

fithisux wrote: post #26

"Clojure and Rust were the only two which had real staying power" rephrase in generic terms "Lisp and SML were the only two which had real staying power" These two languages are the pillars of high-level programming languages, period.

You could say that, but not all lisps are the same. I've tried a few different lisps and schemes, both, but the only one I've found enjoyable is Clojure. This is mainly due to its functional-first approach, immutable data structures, and common abstrations for transformations (so that I don't need to care if I have a vector or a set or a map, I can just conj onto it).

Re: I quit my job to work on my programming language

#28

Post by fithisux »

Jeaye wrote: post #27
fithisux wrote: post #26

"Clojure and Rust were the only two which had real staying power" rephrase in generic terms "Lisp and SML were the only two which had real staying power" These two languages are the pillars of high-level programming languages, period.

You could say that, but not all lisps are the same. I've tried a few different lisps and schemes, both, but the only one I've found enjoyable is Clojure. This is mainly due to its functional-first approach, immutable data structures, and common abstrations for transformations (so that I don't need to care if I have a vector or a set or a map, I can just conj onto it).

I referred to those as generic/conceptual terms. Each class has it superstar object.

Re: I quit my job to work on my programming language

#30

Post by eduction »

Jeaye wrote: post #21
eduction wrote: post #8

> I get DMs, emails, etc regularly with people asking if jank is ready for them to use. I've spoken with founders and tech leads of dozens of companies, at various Clojure conferences and meet ups, who are interested in using jank to solve performance, efficiency, usability, or interop problems with Clojure. I’d be very curious how much interest is people looking to move to a Clojure from non Clojure code, and in tho…

So far, almost all interest comes from within the Clojure community. Getting people from outside of Clojure requires a lot of education around Lisps, FP, data-oriented programming, interactive programming, etc. It's a whole paradigm shift. I will tackle that, but I'm starting within the Clojure community first. Mainly, the people interested in jank are the same folks interested in making Graal native images from thei…

Thanks for the comprehensive answer, that’s super interesting. Presumably these folks don’t need Java libraries (which for my own use cases I needed pretty much from the jump) and are doing either vanilla Clojure stuff or things that they know have c++ libraries. And if they care about startup it’s not the common “long running web server process” scenario (maybe lambda, native app, things along those lines). Anyway I asked mainly because it’s always cool to hear about parts of computing and Clojure ecosystem I am not familiar with, thanks for answering.
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