Why I'm Productive in Clojure
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Why I'm Productive in Clojure
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Re: Why I'm Productive in Clojure
#2> What matters to me in a language is whether I can use it without thinking about it.
I love this statement. It reminds me of the what it feels to be good at mathematics (not my words): "Your intuitive thinking about a problem is productive and usefully structured, wasting little time on being aimlessly puzzled." from http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-understa...
The author also says more about mathematics:
> To make an analogy with math, it's nicer to have a general formula that you can derive others from than having to memorize a whole bunch of formulas for specific problems.
> This is where Clojure comes in. With it I can always easily derive a solution to a particular problem from a small set of general patterns. The number of things I have to keep in my head is not overbearing.
Any language that lets you spend your brainpower on the essence of the problem is a tremendous advantage and joy. This unlocks creativity and productivity.
Re: Why I'm Productive in Clojure
#3> What matters to me in a language is whether I can use it without thinking about it. I love this statement. It reminds me of the what it feels to be good at mathematics (not my words): "Your intuitive thinking about a problem is productive and usefully structured, wasting little time on being aimlessly puzzled." from http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-understa... The author also says more about math…
> Any language that lets you spend your brainpower on the essence of the problem is a tremendous advantage and joy. This unlocks creativity and productivity.
For some reason the only language that let me reach this level is Python. I tried Clojure and Common Lisp, but for some reason I could never be as efficient as I wanted with them, which I think is a shame because in some ways I think the Lisps are superior to Python (due to the "code is data and data is code" of Lisp).
Re: Why I'm Productive in Clojure
#4I'm curious to see how Clojure fares against the current crop of folks becoming intrigued by statically-typed languages like Haskell, F#, etc.
Re: Why I'm Productive in Clojure
#5I'm curious to see how Clojure fares against the current crop of folks becoming intrigued by statically-typed languages like Haskell, F#, etc.
I'm a strong static-typing advocate, and for years this has put me off learning Clojure. (In fact, my very first HN submission, back in 2010, was about Clojure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1453259). I've been coding exclusively in Clojure for the last month however, and I found it extremely enjoyable to use. Much easier to learn than Haskell, for example, because Clojure isn't purely functional.
The key of Clojure is that it's pragmatic, as opposed to dogmatic. It's a language designed to solve real-world problems in production environments (hence the focus on concurrency, for example).
Also, being a lisp, it's a "programmable programming language", and once you realize the power that that gives you, it's hard not to fall in love with it.
Re: Why I'm Productive in Clojure
#6I'm curious to see how Clojure fares against the current crop of folks becoming intrigued by statically-typed languages like Haskell, F#, etc.
Why should it fare against them at all? statically and dynamically typed languages have happily coexisted since John McCarthy designed Lisp.
Re: Why I'm Productive in Clojure
#7My biggest problem with Clojure (specifically ClojureScript) is that it's too workflow opinionated. Nearly all Clojure devs use 1 of 2 text editors. Nearly everyone uses Leiningen. Nearly everyone uses some sort of auto-builder. Nearly everyone uses hot-swapping.
Clojure wasn't even optimized for this workflow, it's just the only one that works. So as much as I love the language I keep going away from it because I prefer the freedom of my own workflow.
Re: Why I'm Productive in Clojure
#8I'm curious to see how Clojure fares against the current crop of folks becoming intrigued by statically-typed languages like Haskell, F#, etc.
I have a friend who is deeply into modern static-typed languages (Haskell and OCaml), but has worked professionally for a couple of years in Clojure. His big gripe with Clojure is that it's still dynamically typed, and thus vulnerable to type-based uncertainties. In languages like OCaml, lots of bugs are actually syntax errors and will be caught at compile time.
On the other hand, Clojure is at least a functional language. You get the benefits of immutability, no side effects, higher order functions, etc, in a neat and understandable package. And it runs in the JVM and thus has access to the bazillion or so libraries written in Java, thus getting around the interop problems that other modern languages (and some older ones) have.
Re: Why I'm Productive in Clojure
#9My biggest problem with Clojure (specifically ClojureScript) is that it's too workflow opinionated. Nearly all Clojure devs use 1 of 2 text editors. Nearly everyone uses Leiningen. Nearly everyone uses some sort of auto-builder. Nearly everyone uses hot-swapping. Clojure wasn't even optimized for this workflow, it's just the only one that works. So as much as I love the language I keep going away from it because I pr…
I'm curious what language and workflow you prefer? In my opinion, there are plenty of other technologies (quite popular ones at that) that have a specific workflow considered "best practice", arguably because "it's just the only one that works".
Re: Why I'm Productive in Clojure
#10My biggest problem with Clojure (specifically ClojureScript) is that it's too workflow opinionated. Nearly all Clojure devs use 1 of 2 text editors. Nearly everyone uses Leiningen. Nearly everyone uses some sort of auto-builder. Nearly everyone uses hot-swapping. Clojure wasn't even optimized for this workflow, it's just the only one that works. So as much as I love the language I keep going away from it because I pr…
When you're buying into a languague, you're also buying into the ecosystem, and if the ecosystem elected it's tools, and it's optimizing it's workflow towards those, then that's what it is. You either buy the whole package (leiningen specifically, I'm not sure what's the editor problem you mention), or you don't.