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Clojure 1.11 is now available

clojure.org

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Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#21

Post by iLemming »

buzzwords wrote: post #8

I do wonder what has to happen for greater adoption of Clojure.

Nothing. It is still growing. Slowly, steadily, systematically. Clojure evolves strategically, not tactically. Besides, no matter what happens - Clojure would stay a niche language. There are certain benefits to that. Those who tie business worth and technical advantages to language popularity, often ignore them.

My unit (just like many other Clojure teams) has been building numerous solutions for many years now. Our employer loves us very much. As long as we keep making money; maintain our codebase aiming for expansion rather than [quartely] renovation - investors won't care what we use to achieve the results. If other companies prefer hiring new devs and rebuilding everything every two years - well, that's their money.

Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#22

Post by Jonovono »

mixedCase wrote: post #20
buzzwords wrote: post #8

I do wonder what has to happen for greater adoption of Clojure.

I would never use it under any circumstance of my choosing, since it's a dynamically typed language and I don't have any further need for any more of those at the moment; in fact only looking to cut down on my usage of them. But from my experience working with it on real projects: - Good tutorials, combined with library and build tooling integration for usage with GraalVM. Startup times make it a horrible fit for any…

..... you realise clojure has one of the most powerful ways to 'type' your language? Like 100x more powerful than the typescript or whatever type language you are using now ;p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNTQ-M_uSo8

Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#23

Post by mattmein »

mixedCase wrote: post #20
buzzwords wrote: post #8

I do wonder what has to happen for greater adoption of Clojure.

I would never use it under any circumstance of my choosing, since it's a dynamically typed language and I don't have any further need for any more of those at the moment; in fact only looking to cut down on my usage of them. But from my experience working with it on real projects: - Good tutorials, combined with library and build tooling integration for usage with GraalVM. Startup times make it a horrible fit for any…

>> other languages have radically different tools and practices that lead to far fewer footguns

Can you share any examples of these different tools and practices?

Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#24

Post by mixedCase »

Jonovono wrote: post #22
mixedCase wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never use it under any circumstance of my choosing, since it's a dynamically typed language and I don't have any further need for any more of those at the moment; in fact only looking to cut down on my usage of them. But from my experience working with it on real projects: - Good tutorials, combined with library and build tooling integration for usage with GraalVM. Startup times make it a horrible fit for any…

..... you realise clojure has one of the most powerful ways to 'type' your language? Like 100x more powerful than the typescript or whatever type language you are using now ;p https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNTQ-M_uSo8

Clojure.spec is runtime analysis, not static analysis. They aren't solutions in the same space.

Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#25

Post by mixedCase »

mattmein wrote: post #23
mixedCase wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never use it under any circumstance of my choosing, since it's a dynamically typed language and I don't have any further need for any more of those at the moment; in fact only looking to cut down on my usage of them. But from my experience working with it on real projects: - Good tutorials, combined with library and build tooling integration for usage with GraalVM. Startup times make it a horrible fit for any…

>> other languages have radically different tools and practices that lead to far fewer footguns Can you share any examples of these different tools and practices?

"Advanced" (read: decades old) type systems. They provide tools like algebraic data types, generics, interfaces, row polymorphism and many others, but just those four allow expressing a gargantuan amount of invariants in the type system without sacrificing flexibility. Invariants that can be proven once and be maintained throughout years of code churn without repetitive runtime checks, heavy discipline or overly repetitive automated tests that attempt to poorly reimplement a type system.

They can be used not only as a way to let the compiler help you out in not making mistakes but also as an exploratory tool to test out many edge cases with quick feedback and as an informational aid to help quickly introduce new developers into a codebase with its own business domain explained in a language that allows conveying "this is possible" and "this isn't possible" much more quickly than reading tons of procedural code until the reader comprehends all the implicit rules laid down by the program's behavior.

Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#26

Post by iLemming »

mixedCase wrote: post #24
Jonovono wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..... you realise clojure has one of the most powerful ways to 'type' your language? Like 100x more powerful than the typescript or whatever type language you are using now ;p https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNTQ-M_uSo8

Clojure.spec is runtime analysis, not static analysis. They aren't solutions in the same space.

When I was working for a fintech company, we built a suite of specs for a ledger. Based on those specs, we could generate data. And it wasn't just some set of key/value pairs with completely randomized numbers. It would generate "a proper" ledger, where every number in a transaction depends on other transactions.

We used that generated data to render UI locally and on the non-prod environments.

Using the same specs we built data validators, we re-used the specs to validate data in the input fields in the UI, which is totally bonkers. How the heck do you achieve code re-use between completely incompatible ecosystems - in our case, JVM and Javascript? Even Nodejs doesn't always let you re-use code between the backend and the front. Clojure does.

Using the same specs, we've built property-based/generative tests.

Before, I never experienced the joy of creating such robust, predictable, and reliable software with any other (statically typed or otherwise) language.

I'm not saying you cannot build a similar thing (or even better) with Scala or Haskell (or some other PL). The simplicity of how Clojure allows you to write stuff like that - is just incomparable.

Once again, I'd repeat the point I made in the parent thread: Clojure has an excellent price/quality ratio for building software. ROI from hiring Clojure devs, in many cases notably higher.

Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#27

Post by iLemming »

mixedCase wrote: post #25
mattmein wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> other languages have radically different tools and practices that lead to far fewer footguns Can you share any examples of these different tools and practices?

"Advanced" (read: decades old) type systems. They provide tools like algebraic data types, generics, interfaces, row polymorphism and many others, but just those four allow expressing a gargantuan amount of invariants in the type system without sacrificing flexibility. Invariants that can be proven once and be maintained throughout years of code churn without repetitive runtime checks, heavy discipline or overly repe…

Well, respectfully (while not disagreeing with you), I have to say that you seem to live in some idealistic utopia of software crafting. Between the crazy world of gazillion lines of shitty Python or Javascript, and some incredible proof assistants, I think Clojure finds itself in a quite pragmatic, practical, and cozy niche.

Notably, Clojure "speaks money". Money necessitates reliability and requires defect-free software. At the same time, modern, digitized money management desires flexibility and efficiency in fixing bugs and adding new features; Clojure very often fits perfectly for it.

That is why it is so prevalent within fintech startups. If someone pays you to play around with advanced type systems, and you love that, what can I say? You are a lucky one. I get paid to build something that works. I'm not a zealot; I use Clojure because it makes sense (for me). But some people prefer Python and Javascript. And that's fine.

Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#28

Post by phtrivier »

buzzwords wrote: post #8

I do wonder what has to happen for greater adoption of Clojure.

- ease the onboarding. Every few months I try to give clojure another shot, and every few months _some_ part of the setup has changed and / or is broken.

- compile to small binaries that run fast. I get what the langage gets from the JVM, but those 5,10 seconds I get before _anything_ runs, even after I had everything compiled ?

- show me an example of how having 'spec' is going to help me refactor the code that I got wrong the first time, as easily as what a proto-ML-like static type checker does. It's not a question of "types are bad vs types are good thing". It's a question of "this property was called 'name', but now I need it to be 'names', and I really need to know every possible place of my code base that uses it so that I can recursively change all code paths to handle the fact that it's a list, now." I read the spec doc a dozen times, and I don't think it does help in this simplest of simple case.

Also, I make typos all the time, and caml / typescript / rust catch them before I waste a run cycle. Dynamic langages can't know if 'names' and 'name' coexist - Let me tell the compiler what I mean once.

- promote an "obvious" gui lib. It's not obvious what I need to use to do an hello world window (but that's really not specific to clojure, in all fairness...)

Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#29

Post by mixedCase »

iLemming wrote: post #26
mixedCase wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clojure.spec is runtime analysis, not static analysis. They aren't solutions in the same space.

When I was working for a fintech company, we built a suite of specs for a ledger. Based on those specs, we could generate data. And it wasn't just some set of key/value pairs with completely randomized numbers. It would generate "a proper" ledger, where every number in a transaction depends on other transactions. We used that generated data to render UI locally and on the non-prod environments. Using the same specs w…

I'm glad you found great uses for clojure.spec. We need more tools like it.

If you ever find yourself writing TypeScript I'd recommend you try io-ts, which fullfills the same role as clojure.spec but is also able to auto-generate types from the runtime codecs, which you can then use in your functions to make sure they are only used with data that passed decoding. Not having to rely on discipline or "pinky promising" that you have decoded data is a huge boon when changing code later, or understanding the full scope of a function.

This isn't unique of course to Clojure or TypeScript as you mentioned, but there aren't too many good libraries built on the concept, and it doesn't work well in all languages.

> How the heck do you achieve code re-use between completely incompatible ecosystems - in our case, JVM and Javascript?

Just to point it out, Clojure does this the same as everyone else and has the same issue: So long as you don't call runtime-specific non-portable functionality, you should be good. Plenty of Clojure libraries targeting the JVM do not work on ClojureScript and viceversa.

> Clojure has an excellent price/quality ratio for building software

I agree that Clojure is fairly competitive, so long as we're talking initially building software. I just find it that specially once maintenance, rapid requirement changes, junior engineers, and staff rotation is taken into account, either developer productivity or the robustness of the software falls off a cliff.

Re: Clojure 1.11 is now available

#30

Post by mixedCase »

iLemming wrote: post #27
mixedCase wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Advanced" (read: decades old) type systems. They provide tools like algebraic data types, generics, interfaces, row polymorphism and many others, but just those four allow expressing a gargantuan amount of invariants in the type system without sacrificing flexibility. Invariants that can be proven once and be maintained throughout years of code churn without repetitive runtime checks, heavy discipline or overly repe…

Well, respectfully (while not disagreeing with you), I have to say that you seem to live in some idealistic utopia of software crafting. Between the crazy world of gazillion lines of shitty Python or Javascript, and some incredible proof assistants, I think Clojure finds itself in a quite pragmatic, practical, and cozy niche. Notably, Clojure "speaks money". Money necessitates reliability and requires defect-free sof…

I believe fintech is mostly a functional hub. There's an above average amount of Haskell, F#, and Scala in it. Most of the Clojure influence I believe comes from Nubank initially starting out as a Clojure shop IIRC.

Unfortunately I also happen to not get paid to play around with languages, although I'm open to such a position if you know of any available one. I get paid to write robust software and to work with engineers that don't always have 10+ years of experience. I get paid to deal with requirements that change every bloody week because we have quick customer feedback, customers that are very vocal about wanting things a certain way and highly intolerant of software crapping the bed when they go and try their "super normal, and expectable" extreme edge case.

I've dealt with those cases across many languages across the years, and you could easily guess that I would be very desperate for the money if you find me in another job working in a dynamic language dealing with constant changes.

By the way, it's okay if you're not familiar with the concepts I brought up by name, but if you have worked with Rust, TypeScript, Haskell, Scala, Kotlin, PureScript, Elm, F#, Swift or one of many others, you're probably familiar with them. They're everyday tools to programmers using those languages, not some strange academic tool.

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