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Why Clojure?

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Re: Why Clojure?

#171

Post by beders »

mabbo wrote: post #93

> 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…

It does look alien. There's definitely a learning curve. But since you have the REPL, it can be very effective in understanding foreign code. Run some of the functions, add tracing to it, debug printlns, use with-redefs to replace functions dynamically etc. Once you understand the data schema better, add spec to the mix.

It is a very different approach and takes time to get used to.

I'm stuck on the other side: I have millions of lines of legacy Java code with high complexity. Even with all the types and very long names, understanding the code is not easy either and the 'step into/step over' buttons in the debugger are seared into my brain. Luckily IDEA can run arbitrary Java expressions during debugging, which gives you some interactivity back.

Re: Why Clojure?

#173

Post by slifin »

kickopotomus wrote: post #79
jb1991 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has been my experience as well. I have a couple of Clojure(Script) applications that are approximately 3-5K lines each and those have been a pleasure too work on. However, my latest project is now pushing past 20K lines and the mental load has jumped exponentially. There is a much greater need for spec, asserts, type hints, and comments just to keep everything straight.

That's interesting do you have any idea why the mental load jumped? would a static analysis tool working with your type hints help?

Or is there many things to consider at once in the system instead of many individual things?

Re: Why Clojure?

#174

Post by dkersten »

6thaccount2 wrote: post #154
dkersten wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run Clojure without Leiningen and you definitely do not need to learn emacs. I use vim, but Cursive (IntelliJ plugin) is IMHO the most beginner friendly option available (other good options include Nightlight, Atom with clojure olugin, VS Code with plugin). You can run Clojure without learning Leiningen with many of these too.

How does one not use leiningen? Do you just substitute lein for the other build tool provided by cognitect? All the tutorials I've seen have you jack-in to a lein REPL. I guess I could just use the jar file from the download directly as my REPL? I wish more tutorials started that way so I could learn without all the tools that I don't need at this point. Thanks for helping point this out. Cursive has a trial license…

Here are instructions for running clojure directly: JVM, Clojure.jar and nothing else:

https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started#_other_ways_to_ru...

You can also use boot, or if you’re using clojurescript, there are other non-leiningen options too. But really, leiningen is easy — you only need to know where in the project file to put dependencies (if you’ve ever used any other build tool, you can do this) and then run `lein repl` or `lein run` or `lein test` and to package a jar: `lein uberjar`. You don’t need to know anything else to get started.

Cursive is free for non-commercial use. If you just want a simple editor to get started, check out Nightcode or Nightlight.

https://sekao.net/nightcode/

https://sekao.net/nightlight/

Re: Why Clojure?

#175

Post by dkersten »

didibus wrote: post #153
dkersten wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12ish years (more as student & hobbyist), lots (mainly python, javascript and clojure), lots (mainly Java and C++, sadly inly got to tinker with better type systems). I consider myself a clojure developer and have been using it on and off since summer 09. Im using it for a large project now. And yet... I agree with GP. I love clojure, but over time I’m becoming less and less sold as dynamic typing. Spec helps, a litt…

Very interesting, and thanks for answering. Could I ask what kind of project it is? I wonder if I'm just lucky that Clojure fits perfectly my use case, which is mostly a set of distributed systems of all kinds. So while as a whole there's tens of thousands of LOC. The components have very strong boundaries being as it's a set of services assembled together through RPC, PubSubs and DBs. Maybe that alleviate the lack o…

I’ve written a lot of different Clojure projects over the years. Some large, some small. Back in 2013–2015 I ran a startup entirely on Clojure(script). My current project is an automation service for cryptocurrency trading bots (that is, all the infrastructure, automation, configuration, dashboard etc for running a bot, but the bot strategy and signals are up to the user — hence automation tool, not bot). It’s a large system with multiple services (some running in different datacenters too). Backend is Clojure (based on duct) and frontend is Clojurescript with re-frame.

Don’t get me wrong, if I restarted the project again from scratch, I’d choose the same setup (or a very similar one). I love Clojure and am very productive in it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it could be better still.

> That's pretty much exactly core.typed

I haven’t looked at it in a couple of years, maybe its changed, but when I did, it didn’t really do it for me. It’s still a separate tool that lives separate from Clojure itself and it felt very “heavy”. In my personal opinion and experience, having certain things as separate entities (decomplected as Rich would say) isn’t always a good thing and leads to an inferior thing. I’ve played around with many programming languages in my time (I’m a bit of an enthusiast, I guess. I like trying out languages that are very different from what I already know – that’s how I originally got into Clojure) and it seems like a common theme. The closer a feature is to the compiler/runtime, the better it works and seamless it is over all. Another Clojure example is the limitations core.async has, because its an external library: things like > If you’re looking for a typed Lisp

I’m not. I like Clojure’s particular mix of sensible syntax, immutability, sequence abstraction and general way of doing things. Other Lisps I’ve looked at don’t have the same emphasis on these things as Clojure does, so I don’t want another Lisp, I want a language that makes the exact same decisions and tradeoffs as Clojure, except on dynamic vs static types (and actually useful error messages). Maybe one day I’ll give it a try, I certainly don’t expect Cognitect to change their language because of what my preferences are.

Re: Why Clojure?

#176

Post by sbmassey »

namelosw wrote: post #168

A little bit off-topic, but I'm really confused that, why people on HN like Clojure and hate JavaScript? I didn't have any analytical data but it's very obvious already to anyone who read HN often. Are they possibly be the same crowd or just independent groups of people? For me, Clojure and JavaScript (at least for modern React community) are similar when it comes to usage: Dynamic typing with Hash-map centric modeli…

I don't hate any language myself, only the codebases I have to deal with, but Clojure is very different from Javascript in its support for immutability, such that if you want to update values you have to use atoms, agents etc. This goes a long way towards making up for the lack of typing when trying to understand peoples code.

Some people also find the lack of random syntactical noise in Lisp style syntax preferable.

Re: Why Clojure?

#177

Post by fsloth »

pbiggar wrote: post #53
fsloth wrote: post #12

Can anyone give a pro/cons analysis of a ML variant versus of a Lisp variant. Let's say F# versus Clojure? One of the general arguments in Lisp vs the world is that lisp is more concise. F# is really concise. It has datastructures as intrinsic part of the language syntax (just like Clojure, i.e in F# [|,,,|] is an array and in Clojure [...] is a vector, so more or less the same thing). Furthermore, the type inference…

My previous startup (CircleCI) was written in Clojure, my current one (Darklang) is written in OCaml. I decided not to use Clojure again because it's not statically typed, and my number one frustration when I coded in the CircleCI codebase was that it was very very hard to know what shape a value had, and whether it could be null. OCaml certainly has a lot of flaws, and is not nearly as "nice" a language as clojure,…

Thanks so much! This was exactly the sort of industrial benchmark I was after.

Am I correct in summarizing your experience as:

The possible encumbrance caused by types at prototyping phase is paid back several times when refactoring a production codebase?

Re: Why Clojure?

#178

Post by kllrnohj »

didibus wrote: post #123
kllrnohj wrote: post #87

The 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? How well do linters or other things work, or is there some aspect of LISP that means this is just not an issue like it is in other languages? Yes, Lisp makes this a non issue for the most part, because the compile and test iteration loop is instantaneous and integrated fully within your IDE/Editor Still,…

> Edit: Let me address the performance part of your comment as well. I think using a game with 20fps as an example was to show that it could even achieve such performance. Languages like Java, C#, Clojure, Python, Ruby are normally bad choices for games as they are not performant enough. So most games are implemented in C++ with an embedded scripting language on top. So the fact a pure Clojure game can hit 20fps with lots of on screen object is actually pretty good in this case.

What? A hundred on screen objects is not a lot, and 20fps is a slideshow. Pure Java games regularly do 10x that (Minecraft says hello as a simple example, and it's considered badly optimized)

A "proper" C/C++ engine you'd expect 100x (thousand objects at hundreds of FPS, or things like Factorio which are 10s of thousands of objects at 60 fps).

The anecdote performance is what I'd expect from a joke language like Rockstar. I'm sure the poor performance is not Closure's fault necessarily, and it probably can fly in the right circumstances (or maybe even in a lot of circumstances). Just the anecdote's description makes Closure sound horrifically slow.

Re: Why Clojure?

#179

Post by Keyframe »

pbiggar wrote: post #53
fsloth wrote: post #12

Can anyone give a pro/cons analysis of a ML variant versus of a Lisp variant. Let's say F# versus Clojure? One of the general arguments in Lisp vs the world is that lisp is more concise. F# is really concise. It has datastructures as intrinsic part of the language syntax (just like Clojure, i.e in F# [|,,,|] is an array and in Clojure [...] is a vector, so more or less the same thing). Furthermore, the type inference…

My previous startup (CircleCI) was written in Clojure, my current one (Darklang) is written in OCaml. I decided not to use Clojure again because it's not statically typed, and my number one frustration when I coded in the CircleCI codebase was that it was very very hard to know what shape a value had, and whether it could be null. OCaml certainly has a lot of flaws, and is not nearly as "nice" a language as clojure,…

I have no idea what darklang is (your site has zero information), but what made you opt into OCaml out of all of the options out there? Any previous experience with it prior to this?

Re: Why Clojure?

#180

Post by simongray »

Royalaid wrote: post #6
cultofmetatron wrote: post #4

been jumping into clojure lately myself. after years of js fatigue I've been dying for a functional pairing to elixir on the backend. clojure is growing on me with its nice hot code reloading and macros. (babel is basicly an overgrown macro)

Are you using Clojure or Clojurescript?

Sounds like ClojureScript since they're also saying they use Elixir on the backend.
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