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Why Clojure?

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Re: Why Clojure?

#121

Post by huahaiy »

yogthos wrote: post #119
huahaiy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone who needs static typing, Clojure give them defprotocol, deftype and defrecord. Interestingly, most of the low level libraries in the Clojure ecosystem are programmed that way. If you open up the code of many popular Clojure libraries, you see defprotocol everywhere. So really, Clojure does both: dynamic typing for application programming, mostly static typing for infrastructure library code. As they shoul…

I'd argue defprotocol, deftype, and defrecord provide much weaker guarantees than a type system. Dtuff like defprotocol tends to serve a similar use case to using an interface in Java. You specify the signatures for the functions, and then a concrete implementation can be provided using a library. Ring servers are a good example of this where you can easily plug different server implementations by just swapping a lib…

Nobody would argue that Java is not statically typed. That's my point. Clojure offers the same as what Java offers.

If you write code in a defprotocol everywhere style, as many Clojure libraries do, your code won't compile if you got the types wrong. The same as Java. How's that not static typing? Which part of that is weaker?

So what exactly this "Clojure dynamic typing" nonsense is about, I fail to see.

Automatically inferred type system is not the same thing as static typing. Typed Clojure is the former. Typed Clojure did not catch on, but static typing style of Clojure did, as many Clojure libraries do exactly that: internally, defprotocal everywhere, externally, some Clojure functions to give the illusion of normal Clojure code. BTW, that's the style how Clojure itself is written in as well.

Re: Why Clojure?

#122

Post by golly_ned »

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…

I've never seen anything but praise for clojure.

Re: Why Clojure?

#123

Post by lemper »

> Positive self selection for hiring candidates

> "But what about hiring?" When you use any language that isn't in the top 3 of currently most popular languages, you will get this question. JavaScript programmers are counted in the millions, Clojure programmers in the tens of thousands. How will you ever find the required talent?

is it just me or i, for the love of whatever that is holy, find that fp related jobs are so few and far in between? not only clojure, but also f#, haskell, etc? to be honest, fam, if you want to sell a language or two, at least make it possible for people to make a living in it. sorry to say, mate, but my kids can't eat a "lovely" niche programming language.

p.s., i actually have some working exp. in haskell yet nobody approached me because of it.

Re: Why Clojure?

#124

Post by iLemming »

golly_ned wrote: post #122
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…

I've never seen anything but praise for clojure.

> I've never seen anything but praise for clojure.

I've seen plenty of tomatoes here on the orange site, thrown at Clojure.

Interestingly, years ago, when I was deciding if I should learn Clojure, I have typed into Google "why Clojure sucks". That's actually my usual "research technique" for any new tool - after the initial intro and the wikipedia pages, I typically do that and try to find some criticism, in order to remain level-headed. And guess what? To my surprise, instead, I found a plenty of compelling reasons to learn the damn thing, which I did. That has changed my life, not exaggeratingly, quite for real.

So my conclusion and advice to young programmers? Use whatever tools make you happy. Don't worry about their popularity, don't listen to couch-surfing "experts", try them for yourself. Be skeptical, first and foremost about your own reservations, thoughts, and feelings - something you dislike initially may change your perspective later. Conversely, be looking out for even better ways - remember, it's always possible to find renewed joy for the craft, even after decades of trying different things. There's always something out there that would feel like it was made for you to enjoy it.

Re: Why Clojure?

#125

Post by geokon »

noodletheworld wrote: post #79
chamomeal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been having a lot of fun messing with clojure, but the dynamic typing really grates on me. At your clojure job, we’re y’all using spec? I haven’t looked into it yet, and I’m wondering how much it mitigates the annoyances of dynamic types

I don't think spec with solve issues you are having about dynamic types. Spec is about asserting structure at domain boundaries; once you're inside a context, it will not do anything. i.e. If you're connecting stuff together and you want to make sure the state is correct as you pass between contexts -> great! If you're writing stuff and internally you miss having a strong type system... uh... I don't think it's reall…

why not just program to protocols?

For complex data structures I typically just hide details behind a protocol and deal with the set of interface functions.

You can then freely mess with the internals and not worry about details

Re: Why Clojure?

#126

Post by Capricorn2481 »

iLemming wrote: post #100
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exp…

I use Clojure. I'm aware it's strongly typed. I never said it wasn't, actually. You might want to reread my comment.

But I can't expect most codebases to use spec or malli. The comment I replied to said that's what the REPL is for. A REPL, while helpful for a lot of things, will not tell you about an argument faster than a type annotation.

Re: Why Clojure?

#127

Post by rads »

dankwizard wrote: post #118
viccis wrote: post #34

I like Clojure well enough, but it feels like every single time I see it mentioned now is an write up trying to justify using it.

The kids these days throw the word "copium" around and that's exactly what it is. There is a lot of elitism around Clojure and all of them are looking to throw down. Even your comment has already garnered 1 of them out of the shadows.

I'm curious, how did you form this opinion? Did you have a bad experience with Clojure yourself?

Re: Why Clojure?

#128

Post by roenxi »

golly_ned wrote: post #122
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…

I've never seen anything but praise for clojure.

You've never seen someone encounter Clojure stacktrace-barf when something breaks before. The language isn't perfect. Although it is one of the few I've encountered that does immutability properly and that is great.

The stacktrace-barf has improved a bit in recent versions as I recall, although I've lost the ability to see them by now.

Re: Why Clojure?

#129

Post by kstrauser »

spoaceman7777 wrote: post #67
kstrauser wrote: post #63

I’ve never used Scala or Clojure, but I heard them discussed a lot in the same circles in the late teens. It seems like Scala kinda vanished from common mention. Whatever happened to it, and what made Clojure take off?

I think the Java 8+ functional APIs/streaming/etc. kind of stole Scala's thunder. Java has all of the necessary tools to replicate the functional style of Scala now, and it's a lot easier to hire for, so :/

Ah, got it. So it’s not to much that Scala went away, as that Java became Scala?

Re: Why Clojure?

#130

Post by dwohnitmok »

MarkMarine wrote: post #106
chamomeal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been having a lot of fun messing with clojure, but the dynamic typing really grates on me. At your clojure job, we’re y’all using spec? I haven’t looked into it yet, and I’m wondering how much it mitigates the annoyances of dynamic types

Coming from a love of strong typing (scala) clojure dynamic typing was a real adjustment. One thing I grew to really love is how small my changes were when I’m just adjusting a decidedly brownfield chain of functions that operate on data. With go in place at work, I added a couple fields to a core data type in my business and I ended up with thousands of lines of changes to pipe them everywhere. Doing the correspondi…

The Haskell type `[x] -> [x]` (the equivalent of `List[A] -> List[A]`) tells you an incredible amount about the function. It tells you that the function must calculate a subset of a permutation of the input list. The function cannot be anything else (or else it will crash or hang). In a language with stricter requirements you can omit even the crash/hang caveat.

Don't underestimate the amount of information even simple type signatures contain!

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