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Building a Startup on Clojure

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Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#21

Post by throwaway5959 »

kagakuninja wrote: post #18
masklinn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely does, because there’s a self-selection in being interested in an esoteric langage (assuming it’s not a corporate oddball or legacy langage) which raises the average above the background of targeting “employable” langages: people going through this process show more interest in the field. Though that doesn’t mean they’ll be more productive, and then adds hiring challenges. So the break-even is not simple…

As a Scala dev, I had a similar belief as you: Scala using companies seemed to have higher calibre programmers. Until my current job at a major Telecom. The code is all Scala, but written by a bunch of ex-Java devs. I have made attempts at education, and the code is improving, but the fundamental structure of the services are bad, and there is still a lot of bad code. I am not saying this as a FP purist, some of the…

Had this exact experience trying to hire at startups for Scala/Spark. There’s only so many Scala devs to go around. It also doesn’t help that “good” Scala is highly subjective, with different levels of Scala from better Java to functional paradise.

I’ve been happily coding (and hiring) in Python for the last four years or so. Still doing Rust and some Scala at home where deadlines don’t exist and hiring is a non-issue.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#22

Post by kochb »

tensor wrote: post #16
jmfldn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint X 3 True. But if you have a good well-enforced, sane style guide, then expressive powerful languages can be a good thing. If you hire devs who care more about playing with the language than delivering value then you're hiring the wrong people. You can't ditch these languages because some people are sometimes attracted to them for the wrong reasons.

I actually did start a company using Clojure. All these points are true. Yes, it helped filter candidates in the early days, and also helped attract people to jobs that might otherwise not be that interesting or competitive. It's difficult for pre-funded companies to compete with the FANG companies. However, there were negatives. At the time the Clojure library landscape was less mature. Clojure developers would also…

I also founded a company which built a large portion of our backend on Clojure, using it through Series C. Your experience matches ours verbatim.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#23

Post by jmfldn »

WFHRenaissance wrote: post #14
jmfldn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint X 3 True. But if you have a good well-enforced, sane style guide, then expressive powerful languages can be a good thing. If you hire devs who care more about playing with the language than delivering value then you're hiring the wrong people. You can't ditch these languages because some people are sometimes attracted to them for the wrong reasons.

Counterpoint Part 4: Esoteric languages by-nature have smaller populations of devs. They demand higher salaries for their specialist work. This can hurt you as you scale - salaries continue to increase (secularly), and the pool of possible engineers begins to shrink within your locale.

Yep. This is also true.

Hopefully WFH helps there. In my niche Scala it does. We can hire more broadly. We also hire ppl with an aptitude for Scala and keep our style simple. That helps.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#24

Post by heneryville »

drikerf wrote: post #6
onion2k wrote: post #2

If I was choosing a language to base the tech stack for a startup on these days I'd be very reluctant to pick anything that didn't have a local user group. Slightly more esoteric languages that enable you to write better code faster are brilliant, but if you're successful enough to grow quickly, or you can raise funding, you'll need to hire devs relatively early on. If you've chosen a stack that's too esoteric then t…

I haven't gotten to that stage yet. But I think it's difficult to hire good devs for all stacks, be it Python, Ruby, JS. Clojure community is super friendly and full of very talented developers and I'd love to pay someone to write Clojure :). Yes, remote work for sure is an edge when hiring! Also reminds me of the essay "The Python Paradox" by Paul Graham ( http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html )

2 years ago I was hired into a Clojure based start-up with no experience in Clojure. It is easy to learn, and I love it now. One of my duties is hiring, and we don't look for developers with Clojure experience. Instead we look for developers with good skills in any language, and trust they'll be able to figure out Clojure. In a way, it has actually widened our hiring pool since we can't be shackled to the XXX years of experience in YYY approach.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#25

Post by throwaway5959 »

silentsea90 wrote: post #20
beiller wrote: post #8

I worked at a startup that was built on Clojure. It had trouble finding developers for reasonable salaries at the early mid stage. They decided to switch the stack to python at that point. Just an anecdote!

Building a company in Python feels like a bet against yourself ie the company/codebase will never get big enough that using Python (lack of static typing etc) will ever be a problem

In monoliths sure, but if you’re building services that are compact and tested it’s less of an issue.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#27

Post by heneryville »

meerita wrote: post #5

Question for Clojure's pros: as a designer I started programming javascript for a long time, now I can do my own APIs on Node easily, would it be hard to do APIs in Clojure? Can you recommend me a video course for learn it?

I learned by reading through a book, then working through problems on https://4clojure.oxal.org/. If you've got JS experience it won't take too much effort to pick up. Don't get too carried away with forming the perfect tail recursive pure functional monad or whatever. Get into just doing what you're trying to do quickly, then after you're competent, read other people's code to correct your style.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#29

Post by alfl »

Echoing some of the other posters here: Clojure is fantastic, hiring (several) Clojure developers is hard.

Conversely, you can also get to the end of your roadmap quickly (Clojure being great) and end up overstaffed.

There's a different line to walk with languages like Clojure.

Source: I walked this line.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#30

Post by jwr »

Having built a business on Clojure: I'd highly recommend it. Stable, developed in a mature way over many years, with a fantastic and mature community.

Together with ClojureScript it's one of very few solutions for writing server/browser apps with shared code, which enables interesting economies.

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