2012 State of Clojure survey
cemerick.com
2012 State of Clojure survey
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Re: 2012 State of Clojure survey
#2Somehow I get the feeling that the Clojure community is in the "marketing" phase of the language. I'm starting to see many Clojure threads popping up HN lately.
InfoQ.com also increasingly added Clojure presentations/articles lately.
It's all good, a little bit of competition between languages is healthy. Having said that, I believe it is hard for Clojure community to convert/invite people with what you guys have done so far because there has been no killer apps/tools so far.
Is this largely because of the LISP is such a weird language that it is a lot harder to convince people to use it? Like it's almost "you need to use it for a few years to know the power of it" (otherwise it'll be like a weird version of Rails or some MVC framework).
Here's a few examples that, in my mind, are not strong enough to convince people to use Clojure:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Clojure-in-the-Clouds
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Clojure-powered-Startups
When people look at Rails demos, they immediately have a feeling of how easy it is to develop web-application supported by _good practices_ (test automation, migration, MVC, etc).
When people look at VB.NET/C# WinForms demo, they know it's super easy to write GUI apps.
When people look at Python... well they knew Python was one of the best languages to write scripts/tools in UNIX/Linux environment, and to some degree, GUI apps in *NIX.
Clojure? only people who dreamed of using LISP (and know LISP already).
No offense to Clojure people, but it's just not convincing enough...
Re: 2012 State of Clojure survey
#3Somehow I get the feeling that the Clojure community is in the "marketing" phase of the language. I'm starting to see many Clojure threads popping up HN lately. InfoQ.com also increasingly added Clojure presentations/articles lately. It's all good, a little bit of competition between languages is healthy. Having said that, I believe it is hard for Clojure community to convert/invite people with what you guys have don…
Some of us have been "marketing" Clojure for a number of years now. :-)
The results from the last two years of the survey (e.g. 2011's are here: http://cemerick.com/2011/07/11/results-of-the-2011-state-of-...) might be illuminating for you.
Clojure has a ton of compelling use cases, but it's stubbornly not going to fit into the shoebox of a single domain. Thus, it's going to be hard to say, "Clojure is great because it allows me to address narrow problem X". It's a general-purpose language, and increasingly, a multiplatform/multienvironment one as well.
Also, only ~7% of the respondents to last year's survey came from a Lisp. Most come from Java, Ruby, or Python. Make of that what you will re: Clojure's "weirdness".
Re: 2012 State of Clojure survey
#4Somehow I get the feeling that the Clojure community is in the "marketing" phase of the language. I'm starting to see many Clojure threads popping up HN lately. InfoQ.com also increasingly added Clojure presentations/articles lately. It's all good, a little bit of competition between languages is healthy. Having said that, I believe it is hard for Clojure community to convert/invite people with what you guys have don…
It's true that Clojure is "weird" because it's a different paradigm. It's not just a different language like Ruby was, it's a different family of languages. It's going to be strange if you aren't already familiar with Lisps and/or functional programming.
To some extent, I don't think any "killer app" is going to change that, although it certainly wouldn't hurt. The concurrency features are pretty compelling in that space already.
Clojure's primary appeal is not, and cannot be, that it's easy for most programmers out there right now. The appeal is that once you learn it, it's a better general purpose programming language that runs on the JVM.
Re: 2012 State of Clojure survey
#5Somehow I get the feeling that the Clojure community is in the "marketing" phase of the language. I'm starting to see many Clojure threads popping up HN lately. InfoQ.com also increasingly added Clojure presentations/articles lately. It's all good, a little bit of competition between languages is healthy. Having said that, I believe it is hard for Clojure community to convert/invite people with what you guys have don…
Hello Edwin, Clojure appeals to people: who enjoy a Lisp dev style with bottom up repl coding, who need to be on the JVM, and who like some of the neat features of the language (universal seq APIs for collections, mostly immutable data, etc.) BTW, there are some amazing projects built on Clojure - choose an application domain you are interested in and try searching for that domain + clojure
Re: 2012 State of Clojure survey
#6Somehow I get the feeling that the Clojure community is in the "marketing" phase of the language. I'm starting to see many Clojure threads popping up HN lately. InfoQ.com also increasingly added Clojure presentations/articles lately. It's all good, a little bit of competition between languages is healthy. Having said that, I believe it is hard for Clojure community to convert/invite people with what you guys have don…
Some of us have been "marketing" Clojure for a number of years now. :-) The results from the last two years of the survey (e.g. 2011's are here: http://cemerick.com/2011/07/11/results-of-the-2011-state-of-... ) might be illuminating for you. Clojure has a ton of compelling use cases, but it's stubbornly not going to fit into the shoebox of a single domain. Thus, it's going to be hard to say, "Clojure is great because…
Yes Chas, you're definitely no stranger in the Clojure community :) (I watched your O'reilly webcast btw).
I'm not saying that Clojure should address a narrow problem but if we look back at the history of Java, it offers a few "real" improvement over C++ such as garbage collection, nice standard library, and the promise of WORA (albeit lots of hiccups here and there). By real I mean something that people can see and immediately take advantage of.
I'm sure there are always going to be alpha-nerds who love to try new programming languages out there (especially the hip ones) but when these people are to write Clojure code or to build Clojure tools, they tend to bring their old habit from the previous language, which in turns make their code look like the previous language as opposed to something totally new, probably refreshing, or even have the potential to blow people's mind.
Re: 2012 State of Clojure survey
#7Somehow I get the feeling that the Clojure community is in the "marketing" phase of the language. I'm starting to see many Clojure threads popping up HN lately. InfoQ.com also increasingly added Clojure presentations/articles lately. It's all good, a little bit of competition between languages is healthy. Having said that, I believe it is hard for Clojure community to convert/invite people with what you guys have don…
It's true that Clojure is "weird" because it's a different paradigm. It's not just a different language like Ruby was, it's a different family of languages. It's going to be strange if you aren't already familiar with Lisps and/or functional programming. To some extent, I don't think any "killer app" is going to change that, although it certainly wouldn't hurt. The concurrency features are pretty compelling in that s…
Yes, that seems to be the case: "you need to learn it to believe it". And I hope people take their time to learn it because there seems to be a few articles out there with the message of "I picked up Clojure in a few weeks and re-wrote critical piece of my software in 2 days and it works super-scale".
Maybe that's the power of Clojure?
I really think that it will take a few years before a select few (persistent users, not alpha-geeks) from the Clojure community can come up with some sort of breakthrough that replaces today's best practices, whether it is the replacement of the whole OOP/*DD-movement or the way testing is done, or something else, I don't know. But I do believe that this is what needed.
Re: 2012 State of Clojure survey
#8Somehow I get the feeling that the Clojure community is in the "marketing" phase of the language. I'm starting to see many Clojure threads popping up HN lately. InfoQ.com also increasingly added Clojure presentations/articles lately. It's all good, a little bit of competition between languages is healthy. Having said that, I believe it is hard for Clojure community to convert/invite people with what you guys have don…
Hello Edwin, Clojure appeals to people: who enjoy a Lisp dev style with bottom up repl coding, who need to be on the JVM, and who like some of the neat features of the language (universal seq APIs for collections, mostly immutable data, etc.) BTW, there are some amazing projects built on Clojure - choose an application domain you are interested in and try searching for that domain + clojure
Hi Mark, I'm interested to see Clojure in the LoB type of application. Yes, LoB is boring, but I'd like to see some comparison between the model-heavy/oop-heavy vs Clojure.
Would be nice if the apps show internationalization and some way to handle Time and Money.
Re: 2012 State of Clojure survey
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hello Edwin, Clojure appeals to people: who enjoy a Lisp dev style with bottom up repl coding, who need to be on the JVM, and who like some of the neat features of the language (universal seq APIs for collections, mostly immutable data, etc.) BTW, there are some amazing projects built on Clojure - choose an application domain you are interested in and try searching for that domain + clojure
Hi Mark, I'm interested to see Clojure in the LoB type of application. Yes, LoB is boring, but I'd like to see some comparison between the model-heavy/oop-heavy vs Clojure. Would be nice if the apps show internationalization and some way to handle Time and Money.
Time and Money are handled exactly the same as in Java.
Re: 2012 State of Clojure survey
#10i really like clojure. for me, it's not about the lisp - it may sound crazy, but it's a better python. lazy sequences are nicer to use than generators, and i don't need to worry so much about mutation.
seriously. that's how i am describing it to co-workers: a better python. that should have been scheme, i guess, but it lacked the lazy sequences to get over the "ewww parens" hill. if you're a python user that's starting to appreciate the power of generators you owe it to yourself to look at clojure.
the one thing that drives me crazy is the state of libraries: finding the right library for the right version, and then finding where the pom is. i wish that could be clearer (less confusion about versions and more direct pointers to poms/repos/IDs).
[not sure if it's relevant, but python never had a killer app. i guess it is an "unconvincing" language too...]