Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could load jars on the fly in Java.
TIL that that is possible. Just googled it apparently requires custom class-loader. Thanks for this.
Or you can simply use OSGi.
Why I am excited about Clojure
21–30 of 173 posts
Re: Why I am excited about Clojure
#22That last feature is certainly one of my favorite parts about Clojure. It's one of my favorite parts about Lisps in general actually, but Clojure has a very good handle on it. Having to compile a program before seeing if the changes you made work can be a nuisance. Interpreted programs are slightly better, but being able to make micro-changes to a running instance of a program and seeing in real-time how it affects t…
> Having to compile a program before seeing if the changes you made work can be a nuisance.
Not being able to compile a program to check if the changes you made are even coherent is also a nuisance.
Also, nothing says that compiling a program has to take a long time (eg. go).
Re: Why I am excited about Clojure
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a community of several 10's of thousands of people saying 'everyone' is always wrong. To love clojure you'd have to first become proficient in it and I highly doubt even double digits of HN would claim to be proficient, much less to love the language. In general, you speak for yourself and yourself alone and my take from your comment is that you love clojure. I have played around with it but not enough to be able…
To love clojure you'd have to first become proficient in it... I do not think that the GP was using 'love' in that sense. You can 'geek out' about news and information about something without actually being much involved in that something at all. Witness the popularity of posts about space launches on HN. I doubt that there are very many actual rocket scientists, but we sure do have a lot of people interested in prog…
Love for space travel and love for a programming language are two different things entirely, the one is an adventure on an almost trans human scale the other is a way to tell a computer what to do.
Re: Why I am excited about Clojure
#24That last feature is certainly one of my favorite parts about Clojure. It's one of my favorite parts about Lisps in general actually, but Clojure has a very good handle on it. Having to compile a program before seeing if the changes you made work can be a nuisance. Interpreted programs are slightly better, but being able to make micro-changes to a running instance of a program and seeing in real-time how it affects t…
You can use Alembic[1] to add dependencies at run time, not just adding them to the path, but downloading them from clojars or maven central, eg. using the example from the docs:
(alembic.still/distill '[org.clojure/tools.logging "0.2.1"])
Or something like clojure/tools.namespace[2] to edit your project.clj and then reload/refresh all namespaces to be current.
[1] https://github.com/pallet/alembic [2] https://github.com/clojure/tools.namespace
Re: Why I am excited about Clojure
#25That last feature is certainly one of my favorite parts about Clojure. It's one of my favorite parts about Lisps in general actually, but Clojure has a very good handle on it. Having to compile a program before seeing if the changes you made work can be a nuisance. Interpreted programs are slightly better, but being able to make micro-changes to a running instance of a program and seeing in real-time how it affects t…
What I find really surprising is that other languages that have pretty decent REPL support have not embraced it so fully as Lisps have. Connecting to the live[0] instance a Rails or Django app, examining its internal state and making updates that don't involve more or less restarting the app is unusual at best.
Ruby and Python borrow a lot from Lisp, including the REPL, but some of the most popular applications of those languages barely take advantage of it. Why?
[0] I'll stipulate that you might want to be very conservative about doing this with a production system.
Re: Why I am excited about Clojure
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a fairly superficial level, the :keyword syntax seems reminiscent of Ruby. But I'm neither an expert Rubyist nor Clojurist (Clojurian?) so I would defer to those more familiar.
They both have same roots, the :keyword syntax comes from Common Lisp and others: From Matz (creator of Ruby): Ruby is a language designed in the following steps: * take a simple lisp language (like one prior to CL). * remove macros, s-expression. * add simple object system (much simpler than CLOS). * add blocks, inspired by higher order functions. * add methods found in Smalltalk. * add functionality found in Perl (…
If you remove macros and s-expressions from a simple lisp.. what remains?
Genuinely curious. If I'd had to guess I say just the spirit of the language, the macros being reincarnated as the highly dynamic smalltalk method system. The s-expressions being reincarnated as the blocks.
Re: Why I am excited about Clojure
#27I'm more excited about ClojureScript because it runs in the browser as JS, of course. My mind is kind of blown that Go-routines were added to the language as a library (core.async). And so was logic programming (core.logic), optional typing (core.typed), and pattern matching (core.match).
Re: Why I am excited about Clojure
#28That last feature is certainly one of my favorite parts about Clojure. It's one of my favorite parts about Lisps in general actually, but Clojure has a very good handle on it. Having to compile a program before seeing if the changes you made work can be a nuisance. Interpreted programs are slightly better, but being able to make micro-changes to a running instance of a program and seeing in real-time how it affects t…
What I find really surprising is that other languages that have pretty decent REPL support have not embraced it so fully as Lisps have. Connecting to the live[0] instance a Rails or Django app, examining its internal state and making updates that don't involve more or less restarting the app is unusual at best. Ruby and Python borrow a lot from Lisp, including the REPL, but some of the most popular applications of th…
I'll stipulate that you might want to be very conservative about doing this with a production system.
No kidding. I knew at least one guy who hosed a product launch by doing that. You even have to restart your development instance from time to time to make sure that your application state remains consistent. I've been scared to try, but I suspect that you could live-patch a server though if you were systematic about it and tested the patch ahead of time.
Re: Why I am excited about Clojure
#29I'm also mostly a Rails dev in my day job but have been exploring Clojure on my own. I've found myself writing out functions in Clojure first before porting them to Ruby. I'm very pleased with the quality of the Ruby code I've produced after doing this.
Re: Why I am excited about Clojure
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll go out on a limb and say that everyone on HN loves Clojure! It seems to be the least cribbed language here. Its features are hard to beat - that and Rich Hickey's wonderful talks[0] make you all the more confident in Clojure as a language! [0] - http://www.infoq.com/author/Rich-Hickey
In a community of several 10's of thousands of people saying 'everyone' is always wrong. To love clojure you'd have to first become proficient in it and I highly doubt even double digits of HN would claim to be proficient, much less to love the language. In general, you speak for yourself and yourself alone and my take from your comment is that you love clojure. I have played around with it but not enough to be able…
>To love clojure you'd have to first become proficient in it and I highly doubt even double digits of HN would claim to be proficient, much less to love the language.
I'm pretty sure many times more than 99 HN people have used Clojure extensively. Heck, there have been posts here from teams using it in production on their startups.