Clojure is impressive. It's likely what I'd be focusing on if Elixir didn't exist.
Why Clojure?
111–120 of 202 posts
Re: Why Clojure?
#112The response to "but is it slow" is pretty disappointingly bad. > No. Clojure is not slow. Oh, look, it’s not C. It’s not assembler. If nanoseconds are your concern than you probably don’t want Clojure in your innermost loops. You also probably don’t want Java, or C#. But 99.9% of the software we write nowadays has no need of nanosecond performance. I’ve built a real time, GUI based, animated space war game using Clo…
> How well does the IDE warn I've made a type error before I've gone through a long compile & test iteration loop?
This doesn't really exist in a lot of dynamic languages and especially in Common Lisp, Clojure, APL, Forth, Smalltalk...etc. You write a small piece of code and interactively run it with some data...test if for some scenarios or build actual tests if you want. When it is good, add it to your actual code and you're done. You interactively test everything. Once you get used to it, anything without a REPL is like wading through quicksand. The type error would probably be caught quickly when using the REPL. In Common Lisp, when your code errors out, it drops you into the REPL and you can patch your code while it is running. Smalltalk also has this. Again, when you've seen this, a Java app crashing seems hokey.
Re: Why Clojure?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just do that as a function though? Why use a macro?
You couldn't write it as a function, unless you pass in the 1+2 part to an outer function (macro) as either a list of arguments (1, math.add, 2) or a string (+you have an eval fn). At that point you're emulating lisp without the elegance, and the first approach is only possible because functions are first class objects. If you were trying to rearrange an expression that had control flow or keywords in it (eg. Modify…
I'm apparently too stupid for you :). Please excuse my ignorance. Why can't you do something like the below?
(defun swap (x y) (y x))
Then you can call it like:
(swap (2 3)) => (3 2)
Re: Why Clojure?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the grandparent, but I realized the other day that I'm at nine years of clojure, so... What's made clojure so great, imo, is its unicorn status as a principled-yet-practical language. That "principled" part is not worthless---it means that a lot of great minds are drawn to it. Before react took over the world, clojure folks were already taking steps in that direction. A lot of other things. The "sequence" as a co…
What is GUI programming like in Clojure? What libraries exist, and what paradigms are used? E.g. is it more like React or is it more like Gtk/Qt?
For web frontend (ClojureScript) there's reagent and re-frame, the Clojure versions of React and Redux.
Re: Why Clojure?
#115> 1. Economy of expression Funny, this list is the same one I use as to why I'm so annoyed with Clojure right now. I inherited a mission-critical Clojure ML library my team uses for it's primary business goals. It was written 4 years ago by a research scientist- who quit 3 years ago. We know what it's supposed to do. We know that it seems to do the job well. We just can't understand the code well enough to be certain…
Well, what is your level of proficiency in Clojure? If it was your main language, do you think you would still struggle reading what the code does?
I've inherited code bases in different languages in the past, and generally, it's the unfamiliarity to the language that makes it harder. Especially Clojure, being so different, the unfamiliarity is even stronger.
For example, if you read the Clojure source code (https://github.com/clojure/clojure) are you similarly lost? Or when reading any random Clojure github project?
Also, is this the first time you inherit software like that? Like have you ever inherited other similarly complex piece of code in your main language? Because I have as well, and it is never easy, no matter the language and familiarity.
Not trying to attack you by the way, it may be true, but I'm trying to isolate the variable of it being written in Clojure against the rest to really get a feel of the effect Clojure has over what you are experiencing.
Re: Why Clojure?
#116> 1. Economy of expression Funny, this list is the same one I use as to why I'm so annoyed with Clojure right now. I inherited a mission-critical Clojure ML library my team uses for it's primary business goals. It was written 4 years ago by a research scientist- who quit 3 years ago. We know what it's supposed to do. We know that it seems to do the job well. We just can't understand the code well enough to be certain…
This is why I like python and C, almost impossible to layer in multiple layers of opaqueness with them. You can almost always deconstruct what the original person was trying to do, whether they were successful or not.
Re: Why Clojure?
#117Clojure is by far the best programming language I've ever used. Rich Hickey's Sermons On The Mount changed the game of programming once and for all. With Clojure you could finally have your Lisp cake and eat it. Witness the sheer chutzpah of the guy when he basically told Ruby devs they were doing it wrong at Rails Conf in 2012 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0 ).
It's a lot of fun but as projects got larger and larger for me (thousands of lines, or even tens of thousands), I found the dynamic typing taking up more and more of my time. I've since moved on to statically typed systems where the compiler takes a big load off the cognitive requirements of maintaining and debugging software.
How long have you been programming professionally?
Did you have prior experience with dynamic languages? If so, how much?
Did you have prior experience with statically typed languages? If so, how much?
I'm trying to see if Clojure requires more fundamental programming intuition and experience to sustain in large projects. I work with tens of thousands of Clojure LOC, I don't feel these issues and can't relate, and love Clojure, so I'm curious to understand what context it best applies too. I wouldn't want to force it on a team that wouldn't benefit from it, so I'm interested about learning these aspects, so I'm able to recognize in what context it would make sense for me to influence a team to adopt it or not.
Thanks.
Re: Why Clojure?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not original poster, but my take is: - Immutable data-structures with concise literals for lists, vectors, maps, and sets. Having pure functions and immutable data-structures makes code easier to reason about, easier to test, and thread-safe. (But clojure doesn't "force" you to be pure. The idea is that you write as much of your code in pure functions as you can, and push the IO and impure parts to the extremities. I…
> Macro system Macros are actually my least favourite part of Clojure. Sure, its great to have them and there are some libraries that use them to excellent effect (instaparse, Hugsql, etc), but most of the time, I prefer tools that don't use macros. You can see by comparing libraries that were made in the earlier days of Clojure versus more recent ones: the earlier ones love to use macros while the newer ones prefer…
I do agree that you should prefer functions over macros. The rule of thumb I’ve heard is only use macros if they are absolutely necessary.
But having that option is better than not having the option at all IMHO.
Re: Why Clojure?
#119> 1. Economy of expression Funny, this list is the same one I use as to why I'm so annoyed with Clojure right now. I inherited a mission-critical Clojure ML library my team uses for it's primary business goals. It was written 4 years ago by a research scientist- who quit 3 years ago. We know what it's supposed to do. We know that it seems to do the job well. We just can't understand the code well enough to be certain…
Didn't DJB famously use very small variable names when writing qmail in C? This is (obviously) not unique to C or Clojure. But it is something that is occasionally influenced the language best practices or culture, as you see in the giant names everywhere in Objective-C and the opposite in the push for minimalism in Ruby.
The names of complex functions, even with documentation, tends to be a bigger problem with scale than local variables and functions or utility functions.
Language design stuff like namespacing/modules helps provide a balance between short/descriptive and so does documentation of key/complex parts as well as how you architect the larger pieces and organize code in directories.
Additionally there's type systems, IDEs with docs/function + type signature integration, standards like JSDoc, etc that help. So it's a mix of a lot of things besides the human.
Re: Why Clojure?
#120Clojure is by far the best programming language I've ever used. Rich Hickey's Sermons On The Mount changed the game of programming once and for all. With Clojure you could finally have your Lisp cake and eat it. Witness the sheer chutzpah of the guy when he basically told Ruby devs they were doing it wrong at Rails Conf in 2012 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0 ).
Oh man this talk... so incredibly good. The principle of simplicity vs easy is what drew me to Elixir, and what I'm starting to dislike about Rust. In Erlang/Elixir, you have patterns, and interfaces which are fairly low level, but provide meaningful abstractions over common goals... I.e. we have OTP. OTP is fairly simple, and that doesn't mean it's easy, it's really not, but it can be simple once you're familiar wit…
FYI, Clojure can run on the beam: https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl