111–120 of 261 posts
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.
Quite a few things (the invokedynamic bytecode for example) were added to the JVM that aren't even used in Java.
In fact Oracle has done more recently than Sun did in regards to hosting other programming languages on the JVM (see: https://github.com/graalvm/truffleruby).
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.
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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 seem…
Clojure's "killer feature" for me is the by-default persistent data structures. Are there any other functional languages out there with similar features? Lisp or otherwise.
> 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.
Clojure doesn't make it nearly clear enough that development needs to be performed interactively against a running instance of your application, with a REPL integrated into your editor. And yes tests run instantly when doing this.
Anything else is pure pain.
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.
There seems to be a very nice solution to the parenthesis problem: https://sourceforge.net/p/readable/wiki/Home/ I have no idea why it hasn't caught on. As far as I'm aware, there's no Clojure implementation. Lispers like their parentheses.
Because there is no parenthesis problem; there's a newb problem. The people who complain about parenthesis haven't used a Lisp long enough, that's all. Parens are a feature, not a problem, and everyone eventually figures that out and stops complaining or they move on to a language more suited to them.
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?
It's a little different if you're either creating a domain-specific language (at that point you've already made the decision to have a new language, so go nuts) or if you're adding new control structures that you can't have in the base language without excessive boilerplate (see for example the somewhat common AIF macro, which binds its conditional result to a variable). But I'd consider making a new MY-LET macro because I don't like what the built-in LET looked like to be a bit gauche.
Regardless, I just decided to stick with the Lisp dialect that already worked the way I wanted.
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I think that's more an indication of _just how much the needle has been moved_. 5 years ago mainstream was something like PHP or Java 6.
Err, maybe 15 years ago, sure. 5 years ago it was the same applicants as today, only minus Go and Rust. Python and Ruby were strong in the dynamic region, Perl 6 was still an inside joke, C++ still dominated game development, Javascript was still the mainstay of web development, and so forth.
Is Ruby supposed to be an example of "not dying" language? Because it has certainly passed its glory days as well. Also Common Lisp is better in every way ;) There's even a JVM implementation (ABCL) for people who like that sort of stuff.
True, Common Lisp is better in every way, but still Clojure has its uses (in my opinion, mainly when you need to interact with a lot of Java libraries and don't want to submit to the sadism of the Java language.) Also, the more Clojure users out there, the more people are potentially able to "jump" to the other Lisps like Racket, Arc, Scheme, and CL.
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For your second example, your JavaScript is wrong. Let's compare the ES2015 JavaScript: ((a, b) => a * b)(6, 4); ...against the Clojure: ((fn [a b] (* a b)) 6 4) Not a lot in it, really, is there?
If we're golfing... (#(* %1 %2) 6 4)
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