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My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

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Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

#21

Post by pdimitar »

chamomeal wrote: post #19
pdimitar wrote: post #6

With respect, this topic in particular has been beaten to death. I too liked Clojure when I tried it some years ago (agreed on the composition and data structures; both are _great_). But the real value-add is in the runtime, not the syntax. Java has a solid runtime but it's not yet as good as Erlang's, maybe even not up to the standards of Golang -- I am talking concurrency / parallelism here (for memory management I…

Are JVM virtual threads not on par with golangs's concurrency? I think core.async even uses virtual threads now

If they are, I have not heard about it (which does not mean much, I check Java once a year). And if they really are then I'd give Java a serious look again because it's a mature ecosystem that was gimped by ancient runtime decisions for literal decades.

Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

#22

Post by everforward »

y1n0 wrote: post #12
BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #7

> The seq abstraction, for example, means I usually don’t have to worry about what kind of sequence I’m dealing with Eh? That's completely lifted from CL ( https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/t_seq... ). Same for AREF/NTH, there's ELT. Other than that, I agree, CL is baroque yet needs some hole filling here and there. > Lisp: everything is a list But that's wrong. Not even a little. Unless you mean…

I haven’t used clojure in quite a while but what’s the issue with (let [a b] …)? Is (let (a b) …) even valid clojure?

I believe it would be (let ‘(a b)), but I’m not sure if that’s valid or not. That’s how Racket does its version of defn

Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

#23

Post by gleenn »

gertlabs wrote: post #2

The functional paradigm is a bit uncomfortable at first, but it does make problem solving feel... different. I personally find OOP to be the most intuitive for large scale systems design, but that's just me. Most models do not perform particularly well in Clojure, but OpenAI models fully utilize the power of the language. Subjectively, it kind of seems to match the personality. Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings?p…

> I personally find OOP to be the most intuitive for large scale systems design, but that's just me.

The beauty of Clojure shines through when you want to change something that cuts through a large part of a large project. If you are using mutable data, you may end up with many bugs from various pieces of code mutating objects inconsistently. With Clojure, if someone hands you data, you can't possibly break some distant piece of code by updating an object: it's just not possible because you only ever make fast, updated copies. The more complicated your codrbase gets, the more this benefit is realized.

I actually kind of think of it as an easier mechanism with similar outcomes to Rust's borrow checker. Only one piece of code ever owns the data so things end up much safer. However it is way easier to use IMHO because you just know that zero people own anything and everyone can read everything.

It also makes converting some code to be multi-threaded extremely easily and with some constraints guaranteeably correct.

Lots of dovetailing features neatly put together for both clarity and less bugs and more usable cores which are probably sitting idle.

Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

#25

Post by bcrosby95 »

gertlabs wrote: post #17
xoxolian wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link! What would you say is missing from Clojure for large-scale OOP design? As I understand, Clojure gives you OOP a la carte. Objects (via maps/records/structs), polymorphic dispatch (via multimethods/protocols/case), types (via Malli/TypedClojure), inheritance (via derived, isa?, etc), some encapsulation (via defn-/^:private)...

I might just be a simpleton -- I never had the resolve to try an ambitious project in Clojure. I was not aware that you could get full OOP though, what you are describing feels like yes technically possible but kind of a hack to get inheritance / no type hierarchy enforcement. I'm no expert on the language though

I actually disagree. Once you remove the cruft and crap of the involved syntax, good OOP design tends to look damn close to FP design. So I flip your point of view - class based OOP is the hack - despite not really using Clojure or FP in my dayjob or hobby projects anymore. Most fun I had with OOP was definitely Common Lisp though.

Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

#26

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

gertlabs wrote: post #2

The functional paradigm is a bit uncomfortable at first, but it does make problem solving feel... different. I personally find OOP to be the most intuitive for large scale systems design, but that's just me. Most models do not perform particularly well in Clojure, but OpenAI models fully utilize the power of the language. Subjectively, it kind of seems to match the personality. Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings?p…

Rich Hickey's: Are We There Yet may be interesting to any one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScEPu1cs4l0

I found this to be one of the more interesting talks I've watched.

Like you (I think) - I love functional languages.

But there's a problem I can't really figure out how to articulate where they reach a level where they stop "just working" imo. Maybe it's just me being too dumb.

Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

#27

Post by xoxolian »

chamomeal wrote: post #18
xoxolian wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link! What would you say is missing from Clojure for large-scale OOP design? As I understand, Clojure gives you OOP a la carte. Objects (via maps/records/structs), polymorphic dispatch (via multimethods/protocols/case), types (via Malli/TypedClojure), inheritance (via derived, isa?, etc), some encapsulation (via defn-/^:private)...

Not the person you're replying to, but have you tried TypedClojure? I've always thought clojure-with-types would literally be the perfect language, but I also read TypedClojure is more of a research project than a real language that you should use in prod.

No sorry, of the things I've listed, I'd never seen nor heard of a project that uses Typed Clojure, nor probably inheritance via dervied/isa?.

For static (partial) typing, I instead use Malli schemas. I do this for every larger Clojure program I make, because there's always something that needs paranoia, or it's handy to generate example data.

Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

#28

Post by schonfinkel »

gertlabs wrote: post #2

The functional paradigm is a bit uncomfortable at first, but it does make problem solving feel... different. I personally find OOP to be the most intuitive for large scale systems design, but that's just me. Most models do not perform particularly well in Clojure, but OpenAI models fully utilize the power of the language. Subjectively, it kind of seems to match the personality. Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings?p…

> I personally find OOP to be the most intuitive for large scale systems design, but that's just me.

Once you're more comfortable with it and want to try a typed functional programming language, I highly recommend checking OCaml (or SML, if you're into old school tech) and see how the Module Functors are applied, most software will look extremely over-engineered after you write a few functors. It's the feature I miss the most when coding in F# or Gleam, for instance.

Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

#29

Post by cogman10 »

pdimitar wrote: post #21
chamomeal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are JVM virtual threads not on par with golangs's concurrency? I think core.async even uses virtual threads now

If they are, I have not heard about it (which does not mean much, I check Java once a year). And if they really are then I'd give Java a serious look again because it's a mature ecosystem that was gimped by ancient runtime decisions for literal decades.

As of Java 24 (Java 25 being an LTS) I'd say they are equivalent. You can use a virtual thread just like you use a regular thread and there's basically no handicaps or gotchas. In Java 21, when they were released, there is a gotcha that the pretty normal use of the `synchronized` keyword would pin a "carrier thread" which ends up blocking all virtual threads from running on that carrier thread.

Pinning can still happen in some much more rare cases, same with go. For example, FFI.

The memory usage, performance, etc are all go like. You can spawn millions of virtual threads with hardly and memory requirements and without overburdening the OS with context switches. The JVM also enjoys faster GC performance with virtual threads.

Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month

#30

Post by tymscar »

embedding-shape wrote: post #11
HiPhish wrote: post #3

> I am now generating this website with Clojure As everyone knows, you are not a true lisper until you have written your own static site generator. It gave me such a great high with how easy it was to add my own "templating engine" on top, implemented all using macros. The downside is that the crash came hard; there is so much more to a good static site generator such as optimizing the output, supporting scoped CSS,…

Heh, inspired by hiccup, I ended up implementing my favorite Clojure templating library but in Nix, exactly for the purpose of static site generation :) Even have a nifty demo of how it looks for that, it basically looks/works the same as hiccup: https://emsh.cat/niccup/examples/blog/

This is awesome, thanks for sharing
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