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Try Clojure

tryclojure.org

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Re: Try Clojure

#121

Post by jwr »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #2

Maybe online "learn lisp" repls should implement paredit keybindings in their editor and have a short section on how to manipulate s-expressions. Because you're gonna have to learn it to use the language, but it also helps people understand from the start that "oh, so using the language isn't actually complete shit". Instead, this fact always seems glossed over, and because of it anyone who spends 60 seconds writing…

> When in fact paredit makes lisps the easiest-to-edit languages in the world

That is true and whenever I switch from Clojure to C, I immediately feel the pain (what do you mean I can't just kill or lift this entire expression?).

But structured editing has a learning curve, so it's a difficult balancing game. Beginners are overwhelmed by all the parentheses, while experienced programmers don't even notice them and love the structured editing approach.

Re: Try Clojure

#122

Post by jwr »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #48

I'm happy with TypeScript, Go, and Rust. Don't feel like learning anything else.

I'm happy with Clojure, having progressively discovered better and better programming languages over the years, and yet I'm constantly on the lookout for new languages and approaches.

Don't feel like being the Blub programmer and missing out on new good stuff.

Re: Try Clojure

#123

Post by rads »

zug_zug wrote: post #107
xyzzy4747 wrote: post #48

I'm happy with TypeScript, Go, and Rust. Don't feel like learning anything else.

I'm with you. I'll even go a step further, since I haven't heard anybody else say this: My hot take -- There are already too many programming languages in use and every engineers life would be easier and productivity would be higher if we standardized. There is almost no situation where making an entirely new language is the optimal solution. And the worst reason of all to make a language is anything aesthetic (e.g.…

Hmm, maybe we could come up with a standard syntax? We could call it “Standard-expressions”, or perhaps “S-expressions”? That way an entire family of languages could use the same syntax. Now how do we get people to follow this standard?

Re: Try Clojure

#124

Post by nine_k »

ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #115
kubb wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would refrain from comparing Haskell - a research language intended for academia and created in universities, to Go - a pragmatic industry language intended for production and created in a megacorp. Why would Haskell's tooling be better? It's not reasonable to expect that.

I'm actually surprised Go's tooling as as good as it is _although_ it is made by Google. But to be fair, GoogleTest is OK too.

Google has produced a number of quite good tools. See also Bazel, for instance.

During my time there, I was genuinely impressed by the quality of many of the internal tools. E.g. it took GitHub code review tools a long time to get on par with Google's internal code review tools from 2015.

Re: Try Clojure

#126

Post by dang »

Related:

Try Clojure – An interactive tutorial in the browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30423856 - Feb 2022 (93 comments)

Try Clojure in your browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3366526 - Dec 2011 (26 comments)

Try Clojure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1359682 - May 2010 (60 comments)

Re: Try Clojure

#127

Post by barrell »

floodle wrote: post #49
julianeon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary - I think it's much easier! The real advantage of this notation is that it's much, much easier to stack calculations. Example: (/ (+ 34 68 12 9 20) 140) You can imagine how the first part of that could come about: (+ 34 68 12 9 20) And then the second part (pseudocode): (/ sum 140) In Clojure it's easy to mash them together, or for example to paste the first calculation in the second. (/ (+ 34 68 12 9…

A programming language should be first and foremost precise and readable, not concise. I can barely understand the clojure version but when I read the "traditional" one I don't even need to think. If you work with clojure a lot, does it become natural?

I've worked with clojure for years, and it becomes pretty normal, but I don't think it inherently get's better than the alternative, just on par... although it's realllly nice not to ever have to think about operator precedence, especially if you have to switch between languages.

Where it really shines though is when you use the threading macro and inline comments to make really complex math a breeze to review:

  (-> (+ 34 68 12 9 20) ;; sum all the numbers
      (/ 140)           ;; divide by a quotient for some reason
      (* 2)             ;; multiply by two for it's own reason

Re: Try Clojure

#128

Post by zarathustreal »

neilyio wrote: post #83
neilyio wrote: post #57

If you are new to Clojure and would like to experiment with it in a way that is immediately useful, I highly recommend the Babashka runtime for scripting [0]. It's very fun, approachable, and one of the more polished parts of the Clojure ecosystem. It's a particularly good entry point because unlike full-JVM Clojure it has a very fast startup time. Newcomers can use any file-watching /reloading tools (e.g. nodemon) t…

And when you're ready to take the fun to the web, look no further than Biff: https://biffweb.com

I love this so much. The power of being able to connect a repl to your production instance and fix bugs instantly is hard to understate. It’s actually kind of hard to explain to devs used to deployment cycles measured in weeks

Re: Try Clojure

#129

Post by aeonik »

gleenn wrote: post #53
crispyambulance wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...had a spike in popularity despite being very hostile to newcomers. To be fair the community itself, as humans, was very welcoming to newcomers. Really super nice and helpful folks. If anything was "hostile" it was the dominance of emacs and very limited options for other tooling. That, and the horrifically unhelpful leaky abstractions in the stack trace when something went wrong. It's a big step, if you don't al…

Cursive plugin for IntelliJ is a fantastic option, it's not free but it is excellent.

it's nice, but I used to write Java, and even getting IntelliJ setup on my laptop took a lot of fiddling with JVM versions and getting it to recognize my Clojure install.

To this day, I will still have weird issues where Cursive won't run a project, and Emacs will.

All that being said, I do really like Cursive.

Re: Try Clojure

#130

Post by pjmlp »

nine_k wrote: post #79
jakebasile wrote: post #67

I'm glad this is back. A version of this existed in the ancient past and helped encourage me to try Clojure which ended up being by far the most impactful decision in my professional life. It went away for a while for reasons I'm unclear on. I use Clojure nearly daily at my job and at home. Sometimes it's standard Clojure, sometimes it's the excellent Babashka flavor which I use as a make-like task runner and Zsh-lik…

As a side note, I'm always amazed by people who can use a highly expressive language (Clojure, Rust, even TS) but switch to Go when they feel like it (especially pre-1.18). To me, switching to a less expressive language is painful and infuriating. I remember having to switch from Python to Java 5, and how everything started to take 3 to 5 times longer code to express. Maybe the key thing is to only write small things…

We get used to being yet another work related chore.
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