Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

lambdaisland.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 261 posts

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#101

Post by dragandj »

phs2501 wrote: post #96

Oddly, as someone who was reasonably into Common Lisp, what really viscerally turned me off to Clojure was the use of square brackets. This sounds petty but I actually have some rationalization for it. Once you learn to read Lisp (mostly looking at the indentation and ignoring the parens) it's really nice that there's only one kind of delimiter in the language. It allows a lot of easy structure editing with a decent…

Regarding the second point, why didn't you just define your own let macro?

As a Java->Clojure guy I find better readability of Clojure's let compared to CL's support of transpose an acceptable tradeoff, but the point of being a lisp is that you are not constrained by all decisions of the boss?

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#102

Post by rjeli »

frou_dh wrote: post #38
protomyth wrote: post #9

I do wonder how much the purchase of Sun (Java) by Oracle and/or the slow down in Java advancement has affected those languages that a primarily hosted on the JVM.

I always thought the Java tie-in was a double-edged sword. For some potential Clojure users, in addition to learning the language they were interested in, they'd also have to half-learn a language (and its tooling) that they probably weren't interested in. I guess in the US there is/was an assumption that everyone coming out of the computing education system is already experienced with Java.

I can't find the quote for the of me, but it was from Rich Hickey and went something like: "First, you use Clojure to escape Java. Then, you use Clojure to write better Java."

I definitely found it to be true. Clojure takes the good parts of Java's OO system.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#103

Post by graphememes »

flavio81 wrote: post #30
graphememes wrote: post #2

I'm still left with the question of "why all the parenthesis?" While it might sound silly and reductionist, it is ostensibly the single hurdle I could never overcome when it came to lisp languages. The majority resides with the fact that it could work without them, so I see it as an ancient artifact.

For Lisp, parentheses are a big plus. They allow the following advantages: TL;DR: Once you start programming in Lisp for long enough, you end up loving and embracing the parentheses. 0. They allow for an extremely simple syntax, which in turn allows the source code to easily manipulate source code. No simple syntax, no really easy way to write macros. And macros are one of the most essential keys to Lisp's power. You…

This is more an emotional response to me than it is functional or logical one since you can apply all of these points to any other language.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#104

Post by cdegroot »

pmarreck wrote: post #79
rdtsc wrote: post #29

> Elm, Elixir, JavaScript, seem to be better at prioritizing the humanistic aspect. Both in the affordances of the software (Elm’s famous error messages), and in person-to-person interactions. Can't stress that enough. I have observed Elixir community and I have to say Jose and others did an excellent job fostering a healthy, friendly and warm community. That is such an essential component. That combined with standin…

I tried Clojure and literally within the first hour got a super ugly Java stack trace from trying to add two numbers, and that was after already being a bit miffed by JVM startup time (i'm very big on instant unit test feedback). Meh.

That indeed was a complete turn-off. I had it in five minutes. Also, I'm sort of done with the JVM - it seems to breed large, complex things that are hard to manage. If I want a Lisp, I'll install Emacs and SBCL - there's not much the JVM has to offer that makes it a must-have.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#106

Post by Arcsech »

eriknstr wrote: post #51
rdtsc wrote: post #29

> Elm, Elixir, JavaScript, seem to be better at prioritizing the humanistic aspect. Both in the affordances of the software (Elm’s famous error messages), and in person-to-person interactions. Can't stress that enough. I have observed Elixir community and I have to say Jose and others did an excellent job fostering a healthy, friendly and warm community. That is such an essential component. That combined with standin…

I feel that Rich Hickey alone makes the Clojure community very healthy, friendly and warm. The JVM is solid, reliable and battle proven, is it not?

Rich Hickey is really, really smart and friendly enough, but he doesn't engage with the community nearly as much as Jose Valim or Chris McCord (Elixir and Phoenix devs) do.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#107

Post by juliend2 »

mirekrusin wrote: post #44
ufmace wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Rubyist and don't know much Clojure, but that sounds pretty reasonable. I'm not sure if Ruby would have taken off if it wasn't for Rails. AFAIK, Rails pushed forward a lot of new ideas in web development and really brought Ruby into the mainstream. Going by that comparison, I would think it'd be hard for Clojure to really catch on without a revolutionary framework that you need it to work with, which may be tou…

Rails was definitely responsible for Ruby going mainstream, without it, it would slide below Python. More than that: I think that combination of TextMate and Rails brought a huge number of web devs from Windows to MacOS as well. I remember around maybe 2005/6 people were switching from Intel based Windows to, at that time, PowerPC based Macs (transition to Intel was about to happen) just to use TextMate and Rails - i…

I was one of them. I was doing some web design/frontend at that time (2005-2006), and the whole Ruby on Rails movement seemed so different, easy to learn, and yet quite productive. And you could develop on a Mac (!!!. Windows XP was my OS at that time). All the rails screencasts I saw featured TextMate, on a Mac. And so the first ActionScript gig I did was to pay for my shiny new Mac Mini.

Looking back to it, it seems like a stupid cargo cult effect, but Rails is the main reason I switched to the Mac since then.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#108

Post by sanderjd »

reality_czech wrote: post #93

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Clojure is dying. One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Clojure community when Lambda Island confirmed that Clojure market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all new code. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Clojure has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce wh…

Is this an ironic homage to some piece of alarmist writing about something else? If not, it seems way over the top. It was pretty fun to read though.

Re: Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

#109

Post by sanswork »

Arcsech wrote: post #106
eriknstr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that Rich Hickey alone makes the Clojure community very healthy, friendly and warm. The JVM is solid, reliable and battle proven, is it not?

Rich Hickey is really, really smart and friendly enough, but he doesn't engage with the community nearly as much as Jose Valim or Chris McCord (Elixir and Phoenix devs) do.

Jose and Chris really go above and beyond. Almost every elixir/phoenix question I see on stackoverflow has a really solid response from one of them with not just an answer but often insights into the why something works a specific way as well.
Post reply on HN