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Why Clojure?

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Re: Why Clojure?

#91

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

wooque wrote: post #57
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #9

I run a multi-million dollar business which I started with common lisp. I since moved away to go and then rust but I've been looking at clojure again lately. For a team that needs to get s** done and has more per employee productivity than Faang combined it's hard to beat the speed with which you can build things when you have the repl and interactive programming. The jvm while doesn't have great error messages is a…

Why did you move away from go? I don't use it, but seems like productive language, being simple, fast to compile and performant.

So go has runtime failures due to null pointers. When dealing with a bunch of json and dynamic data, I don't need to deal with null pointers in 2025.

Re: Why Clojure?

#92

Post by eduction »

phtrivier wrote: post #36

The part about the "stability" is a bit surprising - in my experience, I try playing with clojure about once a year, and every time, everything is different (I mean, I had to go through classpathes, then lein, then boot, then deps.edn - what is the current way to "try and run a program" du jour ?) Also, is running your "hello world" still going to be incredibly slow, or has something changed in the core system (I kno…

> everything is different… I had to go through classpathes, then lein, then boot, then deps.edn

All that stuff still works and I don’t think any of them broke their APIs? A lot of people still use lein for example.

You’re talking about new choices coming along, which is a good thing.

Of all the ones you listed, only one is a product of the core team, so it’s not like there has even been “change” on any official level.

If your mindset is, “I need to be on the latest hot thing” that’s about you, not Clojure. You’re allowed to keep building your projects using any of those tools, they still have the same capabilities.

Re: Why Clojure?

#93

Post by hlship »

I've been working in Clojure now for about 12 years. Maybe 12+ years of Java prior to that.

I've created some great apps, and great libraries (in both Clojure and Java).

I often describe Clojure as "the least worst programming language", which is an off-handed complement, but I think accurate. Things you don't like can generally be fixed (at least locally) using macros and libraries. The core is strong, a good basis for building things ... and as described all over this thread, stable.

As you master your tools, you gain a level of speed and precision in your work that I have not found elsewhere. The REPL-oriented workflow is a central value proposition in Clojure, and many features (and a few limitations) of the language exist to properly support it.

Working in Clojure feels like I'm working "with" my code, molding it like clay. My prior experiences in Java and Objective-C were so much slower, with long code-compile-test-debug cycles that are compressed down to instantaneous responses in the running REPL.

Re: Why Clojure?

#94

Post by riwsky »

th0ma5 wrote: post #88
Lyngbakr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I prefer it when there is a solid default tool chain for a language rather than having to choose from one of several. That way, I know pretty much what to expect when I open any project in that language. I feel like this is one of the few places where Clojure dropped the ball and that deps.edn should've been there from the get-go.

What language ecosystem does this right?

Go

Re: Why Clojure?

#95

Post by j45 »

patcon wrote: post #90

I've worked around an open source Clojure codebase for a few years. I've grown to dislike Clojure by virtue of the culture it apparently fosters. As a community organizer in some vibrant decentralized spaces, reading articles from inside the community gives me ick feelings. There's a strange phenonemon involved when you have a diehard community that continually extols the virtues of the language, while the popularity…

How to support the creation of beginners might be a different topic (and not a new one to technologies) to the offer of the technology itself.

How was your experience in working with the existing Clojure codebase?

Re: Why Clojure?

#96

Post by lukev »

patcon wrote: post #90

I've worked around an open source Clojure codebase for a few years. I've grown to dislike Clojure by virtue of the culture it apparently fosters. As a community organizer in some vibrant decentralized spaces, reading articles from inside the community gives me ick feelings. There's a strange phenonemon involved when you have a diehard community that continually extols the virtues of the language, while the popularity…

I think there's something here. I'm not sure it's a bad thing. A negative framing might be that there's a sort of elitism. A more positive framing might be that it simply reflects a tension between different, valid views of how to build software which are sometimes (but not always) in tension.

After all, an elitist can also sometimes be right.

Disclosure: I say this as someone who has been about as deep as you can go in the Clojure community.

Re: Why Clojure?

#97

Post by j45 »

iLemming wrote: post #85

I love writing Clojure. Whenever I say that publicly, there are inevitably some voices challenging my stance with skepticism, criticism, and attempts to discredit whatever I say provides practical value for me. Then I have to explain to them, "no, it's not the only language I know," "yes, I've used dozens of other languages before," "yes, including languages with robust static type systems as well." And you know what…

The use of prejudice type behaviour towards others using a particular programming language based on hearsay or unknown is not ok, but also not something new.

The few folks I know using it are very happy with it, and are very experienced, and talented talented polyglots themselves.

For that reason I'd not rule it out, even if I'm not looking to make a jump or change, but I might try it out.

Re: Why Clojure?

#98

Post by tombert »

newlisp wrote: post #83
tombert wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you're right! I stand corrected, it's admittedly been a few months since I've touched Clojure.

You were not wrong though, Java 8 was released in 2014, so it only took them ~10 years ;)

Yeah, and most of my professional Clojure experience was from 2018 to 2021, and a few personal projects in 2022 and 2023, and that lack of support for the functional APIs really annoyed me; I was writing a Kafka Streams application, which uses lots of lambdas, and it annoyed me enough to rewrite it with vanilla Java.

I'm sure it's a difficult thing to implement, so I'm a little forgiving, but considering that Java interop is one of the biggest selling points for Clojure I do think it's fair to criticize a bad experience with it.

I need to play with the newer stuff though; the linked changes seem cool as hell.

Re: Why Clojure?

#99

Post by eduction »

patcon wrote: post #90

I've worked around an open source Clojure codebase for a few years. I've grown to dislike Clojure by virtue of the culture it apparently fosters. As a community organizer in some vibrant decentralized spaces, reading articles from inside the community gives me ick feelings. There's a strange phenonemon involved when you have a diehard community that continually extols the virtues of the language, while the popularity…

I started four years ago and in some ways still feel like a beginner. I have found the community super welcoming and positive - I’ve asked questions on r/Clojure, clojureverse, Ask Clojure and the Slack. A couple of my Slack and Ask Clojure questions were in retrospect poorly researched and I still got super helpful replies.

Did you encounter some hostility?

Re: Why Clojure?

#100

Post by iLemming »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #78
slowmovintarget wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you need a REPL that lets you poke at the living code. It's just different.

I think their point is, even with the REPL, it takes time to track down every spot that function might be called and figure out what was passed to it. A type is very easy to see localized on the function.

> A type is very easy to see localized on the function.

"You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means"...

When you say "types," can you please give a concrete example of what languages you're talking about? Whenever someone talks about Clojure from type theory talking points, they make it sound like it's completely untyped or weakly typed. Clojure has its own type systems, and you can express things in them that are far more difficult to do in some other languages, even with static types. It is also a strongly typed language, and in practice, I feel far more confident about our Clojure code than anything written in TS or Java.

Sure, static type systems have their value, and some of them are really nice. In practice though, whenever I have to jump in to deal with Java, Typescript, or even Rust code - there's so much seemingly unnecessary fluff, and I don't feel the practical worth of dealing with types - it almost always feels taxing. Haskell/OCaml is a different story - I can buy that one. But realistically, getting to the point of writing practical software in Haskell is an incredibly bumpy road, and (relatively) few programmers successfully achieve good milestones on it.

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