Clojure is not Software Conservative
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Clojure is not Software Conservative
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Re: Clojure is not Software Conservative
#2I'm not going to submit this as a separate link, but here's Haskell: http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/is-haskell-liberal-or-conserv...
I want to make a bit of a snarky comment about everyone rushing to disclaim being conservative, but I think this really reflects the fact that the distinction isn't a very useful one for languages, and very dubious even for communities. If it's useful at all, which I don't particularly believe, it's only for specific people.
Re: Clojure is not Software Conservative
#3Agreed. I consider myself most comfortable in Python and I find myself uncomfortable with Clojure's liberal side more often than it's conservative side. I think I still have a lot to learn from and about Clojure but I don't think it fits very well into Yegge's spectrum. The author is correct that the most important thing about Clojure is Rich Hickey's philosophies on simplicity in code. I don't find simplicity to be a very political topic.
Re: Clojure is not Software Conservative
#4What's the motivation for everyone to add noise to Yegge's obviously broken claim that you can reason about software engineering in such a one dimensional way?
Re: Clojure is not Software Conservative
#5I'm not going to submit this as a separate link, but here's Haskell: http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/is-haskell-liberal-or-conserv... I want to make a bit of a snarky comment about everyone rushing to disclaim being conservative, but I think this really reflects the fact that the distinction isn't a very useful one for languages, and very dubious even for communities. If it's useful at all, which I don't particularly…
It was in fact already submitted by somebody but hasn't caught a lot of attention: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367807
Re: Clojure is not Software Conservative
#6What's the motivation for everyone to add noise to Yegge's obviously broken claim that you can reason about software engineering in such a one dimensional way?
He has a lot of visibility, and makes an argument that many people disagree with. Also, on the Internet there is no such thing as "obvious".
Re: Clojure is not Software Conservative
#7Steve is wrong about macros - they don't compose as well as functions, and that's why people don't recommend them where a function works just as well.
As far as adding new things into the language, though, Clojure does tend to be conservative. There is a lot of thought (hammock time) that goes into each potential addition, and whether the increase in complexity is worth the increase in functionality.
This seems like a good thing to me, but maybe that just means I'm a software conservative (I doubt it, since I also love Ruby).
Re: Clojure is not Software Conservative
#8I don't think pointing to surveys showing few Clojure users came from Haskell/ML, is sufficient to disprove Yegge's assertion. If a language's designers came from camp A, yet the majority of users came from camp B, that does not mean the language is not strongly influenced by camp A.
Re: Clojure is not Software Conservative
#9Leaving aside the question about whether the suggested division between "liberal" and "conservative" is a valid one...
It seems like people are not happy for their favorite language being labeled as "conservative". I don't understand why. Depending on the problem domain, "conservative" and "liberal" approaches can have their benefits and drawbacks. I used to work at a company developing software for electronic trading. If anyone said something along the lines "bugs are not a big deal", they'd get fired pretty fast, because actually bugs can be quite a big deal when they cost your customers hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions). On the other hand, a social networking site could probably allow such approach. Facebook seems to have embraced it: yesterday I actually had to post a comment about five times before it finally appeared. Now I know that what I witnessed was probably a result of a "liberal" approach to development :)
Re: Clojure is not Software Conservative
#10Why do people think it's useful to import badly fitting, emotionally loaded labels from politics into software? Behold the stampede of engineers running away from the "conservative" label!