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Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

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Re: Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

#11

Post by Nijikokun »

mkreis wrote: post #5
Nijikokun wrote: post #3

Ultimately, it all comes down to build what you're comfortable with. Additionally, when you're managing large organizations and teams. Build with what you can hire quickly for and easily scale with.

Quick (and cheap?) hires are not necessarily good hires. In my experience (and my theory) developer productivity can range from 0.5x to 5x and more, and those developers in the upper range tend to look for certain programming language which they enjoy, like Rust, Go, Elixir, Scala and Clojure. They are hard to get if you are on a "boring" stack like Java, NodeJS, PHP. So if you might need to invest some time and mone…

I'm not in the business of cheap. I do care about resource availability though.

Re: Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

#12

Post by Nijikokun »

joeevans1000 wrote: post #8
Nijikokun wrote: post #3

Ultimately, it all comes down to build what you're comfortable with. Additionally, when you're managing large organizations and teams. Build with what you can hire quickly for and easily scale with.

In my case, it was definitely worth becoming uncomfortable for a bit to learn Clojure because I was very uncomfortable with the experience of many of the other languages. It’s also great to have endless backwards compatibility and little reliance on changing external libraries baked in.

Never opposed to sacrificing some comfort for learning.

Re: Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

#13

Post by ilkhan4 »

deeviant wrote: post #7
mkreis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick (and cheap?) hires are not necessarily good hires. In my experience (and my theory) developer productivity can range from 0.5x to 5x and more, and those developers in the upper range tend to look for certain programming language which they enjoy, like Rust, Go, Elixir, Scala and Clojure. They are hard to get if you are on a "boring" stack like Java, NodeJS, PHP. So if you might need to invest some time and mone…

I find the opposite to be true, that best and most productive developers tend to be more language agnostic than average, although I'm not saying they don't have their preferences. Specifically, I find language evangelists particularly likely to be closer to .5x than 5x. And that's before you even account for their tendency to push for rewriting stuff that already works, because " is the future, it's going to be great…

Yeah, this has been my experience too. The mentality seems similar to "productivity hackers" who spend more time figuring out the quickest, most optimal way to do a thing than people who just do the thing.

Re: Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

#14

Post by jolt42 »

@OP "Model our domain as a graph of attributes and relationships" and "generate resolvers". I'm curious what your model looks like so that you are able to "generate resolvers"? I had looked into using Malli as the model, but curious what route you took.

Re: Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

#15

Post by jimbokun »

I'm curious if Elixir could provide a similar development environment?

Seems like many similar capabilities, like a focus on immutable data structures, pure functions, being able to patch and update running systems without a restart, etc.

Re: Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

#16

Post by dionian »

deeviant wrote: post #7
mkreis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick (and cheap?) hires are not necessarily good hires. In my experience (and my theory) developer productivity can range from 0.5x to 5x and more, and those developers in the upper range tend to look for certain programming language which they enjoy, like Rust, Go, Elixir, Scala and Clojure. They are hard to get if you are on a "boring" stack like Java, NodeJS, PHP. So if you might need to invest some time and mone…

I find the opposite to be true, that best and most productive developers tend to be more language agnostic than average, although I'm not saying they don't have their preferences. Specifically, I find language evangelists particularly likely to be closer to .5x than 5x. And that's before you even account for their tendency to push for rewriting stuff that already works, because " is the future, it's going to be great…

I agree with you but also agree with the above, if youre stuck permanently in some tangled codebase with a boring language/style, the really good programmers tend to find something more fun to work on - unless they can bring their new skills/experience to bear. personally I'll only go back to doing boring stuff if i can't find a job doing the fun stuff

Re: Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

#17

Post by knubie »

jolt42 wrote: post #14

@OP "Model our domain as a graph of attributes and relationships" and "generate resolvers". I'm curious what your model looks like so that you are able to "generate resolvers"? I had looked into using Malli as the model, but curious what route you took.

I think these words will make more sense in the context of Pathom.

https://pathom3.wsscode.com/

Re: Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

#18

Post by smokel »

Interesting story. I am not entirely convinced that all credit should go to the programming language here, though.

My theory is that communicating abstractions is hard. If you work on your own, or in a (very) small team, you can come up with powerful abstractions that allow you to build amazing systems, quickly. However, sharing the underlying ideas and philosophy with new team members can be daunting. As systems grow, and mistakes are made, it becomes more and more likely that you run into serious problems.

This may also be why Java and similar object oriented programming languages are so successful for systems that have to be maintained for ages, by large teams of developers. There are but few abstractions and patterns, and it does not allow you to shoot yourself in the foot, nor to blow your whole leg off. Conversely, this may also be why complex frameworks, such as Spring, are not always so nice, because they introduce (too?) powerful abstractions, for example through annotations. It may also clarify why more powerful languages such as Scala, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, etc, consistently fail to pick up steam.

Another theory is that not every developer is comfortable with abstract concepts, and that it simply takes a team of smart people to handle those.

Re: Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure

#19

Post by switchbak »

deeviant wrote: post #7
mkreis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick (and cheap?) hires are not necessarily good hires. In my experience (and my theory) developer productivity can range from 0.5x to 5x and more, and those developers in the upper range tend to look for certain programming language which they enjoy, like Rust, Go, Elixir, Scala and Clojure. They are hard to get if you are on a "boring" stack like Java, NodeJS, PHP. So if you might need to invest some time and mone…

I find the opposite to be true, that best and most productive developers tend to be more language agnostic than average, although I'm not saying they don't have their preferences. Specifically, I find language evangelists particularly likely to be closer to .5x than 5x. And that's before you even account for their tendency to push for rewriting stuff that already works, because " is the future, it's going to be great…

Oddly, I think both are true, at the same time.

I've worked with language zealots and it's awful. Especially the ones with the hardcore purely functional obsession. But that can apply to almost anything: folks that refuse to use anything but $TECH (K8S, FreeBSD, etc). Zealots like this general care less about delivering and more about what they get to play with.

Then you have the folks that care about delivering. They're not language agnostic, they have strong opinions. But also: they communicate and collaborate, they actually CARE: they have real empathy for their users and their co-workers, they're pragmatic. Some of these folks have a lot of experience in pushing hard to make things work, and they've learned some valuable lessons in what (not) to do again. Sometimes that can manifest as preferences for languages / frameworks / etc.

It's a messy industry, and it can be extremely hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. But a small team with a few of those can do truly game changing work. And there's many local optima to be had. Get a highly motivated and gelled team using any of: Elixr / Typescript / Zig / Rust / Ada / Ocaml / Scala / Python / etc, and you'll see magic. Yes, you don't need fancy tech to achieve that. There's more than a few of those writing C for example, but you're unlikely to see these folks writing COBOL.

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