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Simple Made Easy (2011)

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11–20 of 38 posts

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#11

Post by nailer »

One thing I've found super helpful on my current project (which happens to be node) is using OSS concepts and npm as a unit of modularity.

Eg, everything is just a grab bag of functions in an npm module (sometimes with a closure holding some state - I either reject or don't understand FP people when they claim FP doesn't have state).

Each module has tests, dependencies, a README, and if it is reusable by other projects, is even OSSd and published. Writing software as if it's going to be published makes me be more modular. Being modular makes things easier to reason about and therefore has stopped by codebase from becoming complex to work with.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#12

Post by nepeckman »

swah wrote: post #7

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case? Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

I feel like every new language has a honeymoon period. Clojure is still alive and well (and growing bigger consistently) but it doesn't have that new language hype anymore.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#13

Post by Scarbutt »

amelius wrote: post #6
corysama wrote: post #4

Simple Made Easy is a great introduction to the Rich Hickey Fanclub [1] ;) Other recommendations for early viewing are "Hammock Driven Development", "The Value of Values" and "The Design of Datomic". [1] https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

Hickey may be a brilliant software architect, but I'm wondering how high he ranks as a business leader. How is his company Datomic doing? Also in the light of the new database service Cloud Spanner just launched by Google.

Didn't see anything about time-series features in spanner.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#14

Post by jcadam »

swah wrote: post #7

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case? Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

Currently using Clojure on a side-project. It makes me so much more productive -- a real win when I don't have a ton of hours to devote to a project due to also having a day job :)

If only I could find a day job using Clojure...

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#15

Post by rlander »

swah wrote: post #7

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case? Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

I felt like that, like Clojure was the future, around 2009/2010. But then Java libraries and their impossible stack traces got in the way.

I've been waiting for a native Clojure implementation (or on top of Python or the Erlang VM) ever since.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#16

Post by notduncansmith »

swah wrote: post #7

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case? Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

Clojure's first stable release was in 2009 so it's either very young or very old, depending on how far you zoom out.

Rust is exciting for use-cases that are very different from Clojure's, and the only thing I can say for Swift in this context is that I prefer it to Javascript, which I in turn prefer to other C-style languages.

I'm currently working on a single-person (but expected to grow) project in Clojure and really appreciate the concurrency and state primitives, the functional standard library, the ecosystem and community of high-quality standard tools and packages, and (while I seldom write them myself) macros, which enable you to you write amazingly readable code. The community has a strong preference to functions over macros, but used judiciously you can get things like Clojure's core.async. So you get the benefits of a Lisp without a lot of the drawbacks commonly pointed out regarding other Lisps. I enjoy it a lot.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#17

Post by pjmlp »

rlander wrote: post #15
swah wrote: post #7

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case? Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

I felt like that, like Clojure was the future, around 2009/2010. But then Java libraries and their impossible stack traces got in the way. I've been waiting for a native Clojure implementation (or on top of Python or the Erlang VM) ever since.

There are few abandoned attempts.

Writing from scratch those Java libraries, including a good quality AOT compiler and GC is not something to do as hobby on the weekends.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#18

Post by madmax96 »

swah wrote: post #7

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case? Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

I think that you are right that Rust, Swift, etc. have the hype now.

In my mind, this is a product of containerization. Java solved a lot of problems that we faced with deployment. Containers have made deployment even simpler, and suddenly the Java runtime is no longer as valuable as it once was. Furthermore, in a service-oriented architecture we don't really need too much interop with existing code.

I think that Clojure is a fantastic language, and I use it for my side projects as much as I can. But the promises made by Clojure dont sound as sexy as they did several years ago, hence the lack of hype.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#19

Post by mej10 »

swah wrote: post #7

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case? Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

Have been using Clojure in production for several years.

It is great language to work in. I have found it very suitable for solving a wide range of problems. Many companies are using it successfully.

Sounds like your view of reality is based on the HN hype cycle. As far as I can tell there are many more companies using Clojure in production than Rust. (nothing against Rust, but just as an example of the bias)

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#20

Post by steinuil »

swah wrote: post #7

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case? Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

It just got old. Those who wanted to check it out already have, those who liked it either got a job using it or have spent enough time with it to get bored, and those who didn't have probably forgotten about it already.

People just need a change every now and then, you can't get excited about stuff you see or use every day after a while.

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