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Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

clojure.org

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Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#11

Post by Zak »

jmcgough wrote: post #8
haolez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it going strong? I'm evaluating it for a new project. I'm considering it together with Clara[0]. However, it does give a vibe that it's not as mainstream as it was before and that the ecosystem is more sparse than what is once was. I'm not trying to troll. I want to choose it. It seems like a good engineering decision to me, but if it's nosediving in popularity and contributors, this might bite me back in the near…

I found myself frustrated a lot when I used it two years ago. A lot of abandoned libraries. There's not a huge ecosystem around it compared to golang and other popular languages, but there's probably enough that it's a viable option if you really want to work with the language.

Something I've found to be more true of Clojure libraries than those in most languages is that they can be finished. Once the code does the thing it set out to do, there's often no need to do anything else. The language is unlikely to break compatibility, and idiomatic code tends to be mostly functional with very clean interfaces.

The one example I can think of where that's emphatically not true is clojure-android, which was tightly coupled to the Android SDK and did not remain usable after the main developer moved on. The Android SDK does not share the aforementioned traits.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#12

Post by hatefulmoron »

Zak wrote: post #11
jmcgough wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found myself frustrated a lot when I used it two years ago. A lot of abandoned libraries. There's not a huge ecosystem around it compared to golang and other popular languages, but there's probably enough that it's a viable option if you really want to work with the language.

Something I've found to be more true of Clojure libraries than those in most languages is that they can be finished . Once the code does the thing it set out to do, there's often no need to do anything else. The language is unlikely to break compatibility, and idiomatic code tends to be mostly functional with very clean interfaces. The one example I can think of where that's emphatically not true is clojure-android,…

I find this to be the case in Lispy languages in general (CL, Scheme, Clojure..); I go looking for a library that does X, only to find that someone wrote one more than a decade ago. It looks weird coming from more fast paced languages, but Lisp maintainers tend to their libraries carefully and might tweak them over the years but they're mostly complete already.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#14

Post by mark_l_watson »

gleenn wrote: post #9
jmcgough wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found myself frustrated a lot when I used it two years ago. A lot of abandoned libraries. There's not a huge ecosystem around it compared to golang and other popular languages, but there's probably enough that it's a viable option if you really want to work with the language.

I think there is this misconception that lack of activity on libraries indicates they aren't worth using. But I strongly believe a lot of libraries are just feature complete and bug-free enough to leave them be. The syntax of the language changes so minimally that libraries don't have to change at all after updates. This isn't Javascript where everyone keeps tweaking things over and over again.

I agree, solid working libraries often don’t need frequent updates. Sort of Common Lisp: a lot of old very stable code that just works fine.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#15

Post by thom »

haolez wrote: post #5
tgerdin wrote: post #2

Looks like a pretty solid release, very happy that Clojure is still going strong!

Is it going strong? I'm evaluating it for a new project. I'm considering it together with Clara[0]. However, it does give a vibe that it's not as mainstream as it was before and that the ecosystem is more sparse than what is once was. I'm not trying to troll. I want to choose it. It seems like a good engineering decision to me, but if it's nosediving in popularity and contributors, this might bite me back in the near…

What you’re seeing sounds familiar but definitely not new. I’ve used Clojure professionally for 15 years and at no point in that time have you been guaranteed critical mass around any library or framework. Clojure has always been a small ecosystem of high variance people and projects. You get things like Rama and Electric which are bold reimaginings of what systems could look like, but you also get a lot of short lived, burnt out efforts that fizzled.

The good news is nothing really _breaks_ ever, and you have access to the entire JVM ecosystem if you want it (many Clojure people find Java interop icky which I personally find moronic).

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#16

Post by aeonik »

haolez wrote: post #5
tgerdin wrote: post #2

Looks like a pretty solid release, very happy that Clojure is still going strong!

Is it going strong? I'm evaluating it for a new project. I'm considering it together with Clara[0]. However, it does give a vibe that it's not as mainstream as it was before and that the ecosystem is more sparse than what is once was. I'm not trying to troll. I want to choose it. It seems like a good engineering decision to me, but if it's nosediving in popularity and contributors, this might bite me back in the near…

The really nice thing about Clojure is it runs on the JVM.

The entire ecosystem could die tomorrow, and you can still compile new Clojure code for any system that supports Java in the future.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#17

Post by jacobobryant »

gleenn wrote: post #9
jmcgough wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found myself frustrated a lot when I used it two years ago. A lot of abandoned libraries. There's not a huge ecosystem around it compared to golang and other popular languages, but there's probably enough that it's a viable option if you really want to work with the language.

I think there is this misconception that lack of activity on libraries indicates they aren't worth using. But I strongly believe a lot of libraries are just feature complete and bug-free enough to leave them be. The syntax of the language changes so minimally that libraries don't have to change at all after updates. This isn't Javascript where everyone keeps tweaking things over and over again.

Also the whole/part of the point of being hosted on the JVM is if there isn't a clojure lib for something you can just use a Java lib.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#18

Post by sokoloff »

Zak wrote: post #11
jmcgough wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found myself frustrated a lot when I used it two years ago. A lot of abandoned libraries. There's not a huge ecosystem around it compared to golang and other popular languages, but there's probably enough that it's a viable option if you really want to work with the language.

Something I've found to be more true of Clojure libraries than those in most languages is that they can be finished . Once the code does the thing it set out to do, there's often no need to do anything else. The language is unlikely to break compatibility, and idiomatic code tends to be mostly functional with very clean interfaces. The one example I can think of where that's emphatically not true is clojure-android,…

Exactly.

Find a random node package that was last changed 4 years ago and it might as well be toxic waste.

Find a clj lib with the same stats and it's probably going to work smoothly.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#20

Post by [deleted] »

haolez wrote: post #5
tgerdin wrote: post #2

Looks like a pretty solid release, very happy that Clojure is still going strong!

Is it going strong? I'm evaluating it for a new project. I'm considering it together with Clara[0]. However, it does give a vibe that it's not as mainstream as it was before and that the ecosystem is more sparse than what is once was. I'm not trying to troll. I want to choose it. It seems like a good engineering decision to me, but if it's nosediving in popularity and contributors, this might bite me back in the near…

[deleted]
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