11–20 of 145 posts
Looks like a subtle ad for Clojure. Which I don't mind because I am slowly falling in love with Clojure. I am not sure if it's a "secret" or we should "write all the things in Clojure" but I'd love to see more companies use it, including start ups. I wouldn't mind working for one. Combine JVM's power with Om/Reagent and I think it's a solid stack. Although I am not advanced Clojure programmer. I wonder how it's doing…
The real real secret is using a language so obscure that you end up writing the compiler for production use, by studying the compiler that some researcher created for a paper.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One day we will find that perfect type system (and associated compiler/IDE/Interactive front end) and then everyone will take one big sigh of relief. And then we all will start fixing problems in a way that makes them stay fixed.
I agree types prevent people from shooting in their foot. Types are what make program ide friendly, and programmer friendly. Got that. But types are also what cause us to think with in the box i.e to say powerful type hierarchies, the ones that save us from writing boiler-plate are also the ones that are difficult to understand, and in Java, somewhat weird. Not to mention they are needlessly specific - Unless you hav…
The author almost immediately writes off Common Lisp for lack of "frictionless access to a rich ecosystem of code written in the same language as your software", then recommends Clojure. Most of the ecosystem you have access to in Clojure is, in fact, not built in Clojure, and most Clojure libraries were/are wrappers around Java or Javascript. Footnote 1 makes no sense, suggesting that the only way to get access to "…
While that's got upsides I must admit I prefer one or two relatively complete and stable packages over way more numerically but leas stable complete packages.
But I come from a desktop background so I'm spoilt in that regard I guess.
I view every additional depency as a weakness a year from now.
But we need types people! Properly static ones that can be used to encode your intentions and handle inconsistency before even running the program. And yes I know that Clojure has an optional type system. But optional means that you cannot rely on having types in the libraries that you use. So you can't fit your stuff together with their stuff and have reasonable expectations that it will work once the user does that…
Types also come with a lot of inherent complexity that you don't get with dynamic programs. Recently, I wrote a Type Provider for web Routing in F#, and it is orders of magnitude more complicated than what a dynamic approach would have been. It is nice that it is not possible to express a program that uses route parameters the wrong way, or provide a route that is unreachable, etc, but it takes a lot more work than a dynamic version with no such safety.
One domain where I think static typing is worth it is for parsing. After having used FParsec to parse a structure, and also having tried it dynamically, I felt the static typing added little complexity for all the safety it brought, so it was very much worth it. But there are also some dynamic parsing libraries that much easier to get started with, such as Instaparse, so YMMV.
In the expressjs example, I wonder how practical is to do all that interop instead of just using plain JS? I mean, is awesome that Clojurescript can leverage all those JS libs, but its worth writing lots of interop just to use Clojurescript? Of course, as Clojurescript libraries grow this will not be an issue, but it is nowhere close to JS for web dev. For me, a more practical approach for server side would be to use…
Few minutes https://youtu.be/KZjFVdU8VLI
Longer http://www.infoq.com/presentations/clojurescript-web-ios
Are there any examples of companies that achieved success by way of language choice other than Viaweb?
JT
I doubt that these qualities are so good that they would be a material advantage for application developers. And certainly not material enough that it would affect the outcome of a startup (unless it makes the engineers more motivated).
That being said, I hope clojure succeeds, and it's on my list to learn sometime (though not in the top 3).