Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

codewithkira.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 87 posts

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#21

Post by thih9 »

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #12

For web server stuff, I still think Clojure is extremely solid. But I’ve come to really prefer Racket for general purpose programming. I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve. Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about i…

Very true. Also, while I agree that Clojure is solid for web server stuff, it wouldn’t be my first choice in the context of general purpose web apps or APIs.

The “do-it-yourself” mentality that is at the core of Clojure dev culture results in a less rich library ecosystem. Not only you often end up writing custom code for a generic feature, the rest of your team cannot reuse their past experience but has to learn your custom code and maintain it.

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#22

Post by sokoloff »

bmitc wrote: post #20
j13n wrote: post #13

It’s great to see reports of the excellent work Daniel Slutsky and others are doing to make data science more straightforward for everyone. I'm grateful that I get to benefit from these community efforts.

Good luck getting academics to adopt anything they don't know about, and all they know about is Python.

Academics is much older than Python. At some point, they adopted that.

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#23

Post by indigosun »

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #12

For web server stuff, I still think Clojure is extremely solid. But I’ve come to really prefer Racket for general purpose programming. I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve. Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about i…

> The design of deps.edn/clojure CLI and the lack of user friendly tooling is forever frustrating.

"user friendly tooling" and ANY Scheme in the same sentence?!

I kid, but I always have held that Schemes feel like "tools for building a programming language" (the insanity that is (car ), (cdr ), (caadadr ) suddenly reveals its usefulness when you write an s-expression parser) and Clojure feels like "an actual programming language" with its benevolent use of brackets, build tools, and library ecosystem.

    (defn my-func [arg0 arg1] ..)    -- Clojure
    (define (my-func arg0 arg1) ..)  -- Scheme (of which Racket is one)
Racket seems to want to inhabit the space between those two with its package system and ability to compile to an executable.

One thing I've always liked about Racket is its refusal to accept (if )s without else statements, insisting instead on using (when )s.

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#24

Post by Lyngbakr »

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #12

For web server stuff, I still think Clojure is extremely solid. But I’ve come to really prefer Racket for general purpose programming. I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve. Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about i…

While I love Clojure, I have to agree about tooling. I recently started using Gleam* and was impressed at how easy it was to get up and running with the CLI tool. I think this is an important part of getting people to adopt a language and Clojure dropped the ball a bit on this.

* https://gleam.run/

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#25

Post by agumonkey »

dustingetz wrote: post #17
yawn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but there are certainly domains where Clojure is the best fit Honest question: what domains?

clojure is everywhere in fintech - nubank, guaranteed rate, kroo bank, griffin, pennymac, two sigma, dividend finance, treasury prime, gravie. Other big areas are healthcare and midmarket adtech. And of course startups outside of SF/NYC with smaller seed rounds looking for tech advantage - midwest USA, Europe/UK, Latin america The further you get from silicon valley the more clojure you see — anyone with a network at…

is clojure market still growing ? i'd love to work in a clojure shop one day

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#26

Post by cmiles74 »

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #12

For web server stuff, I still think Clojure is extremely solid. But I’ve come to really prefer Racket for general purpose programming. I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve. Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about i…

The big push for people to use the Clojure CLI tool seems like shooting themselves in the foot.

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#27

Post by lispisok »

kleiba wrote: post #2

I remember there used to be so much excitement about Clojure - it certainly was the "tech du jour" for a long while, also on the HN front page. It was the "...in Rust" of its day. But is it just me or has it gotten awfully quiet around Clojure? I mean, it is of course expected that no novelty can stay in the lime light forever. But what has become of all of the excitement? My impression is that Clojure failed to live…

I think Clojure absolutely does live up to the hype but during Clojure's peak HN hype days all the people upvoting the posts and commenting in the threads never actually gave Clojure a proper try or a try at all. Rust on HN might be in a similar boat.

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#28

Post by Capricorn2481 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #7
nextos wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not say it is such a small niche. There are job openings here and there. It is much easier to find a Clojure job than a F# or a Haskell job in my experience. This may be of course different depending on your location. The problem is that an entire ecosystem is more than just a new language. Clojure has some really interesting libraries, but the rest relies on Java. It is a good ecosystem nonetheless. Julia is…

And imagine if F# had an alternative native "runtime" (i.e. not married CLR and dotnet) grafted onto Fortran. Resistance is futile, indeed.

I don't even care about the runtime, imagine if F# devs made anything that wasn't on top of Asp.net. The small community coupled with breaking changes from Asp.net leads to a lot of issues, and the interop story of F#/C# and Clojure/Java is night and day

I like Asp.net, but the thing I've run into several times in F# is there are breaking changes in libraries that the developers of F# can't keep up with.

- Giraffe doesn't support swagger docs, you have to use Asp.net directly, because the swagger generation isn't compatible with the way Giraffe does routing

- Microsoft Identity uses EF core by default. The EFcore.FSharp library doesn't support past .NET 6. You could use your own backend, but at this point, it's easier to just use C# interop

You could use C# for the routing of your app and F# for the business logic. But then there's the C#/F# interop story. Lots of little finicky type differences you have to convert. Whereas using Java from Clojure feels easy and natural to me.

And even if you use Asp.net directly and do interop correctly, you're basically using C# at that point. You're missing a lot of benefits of a functional language. It's not worth it in my opinion, even though F# is a wonderful language to me.

It's tough to learn the ecosystem in Clojure. But once you do, I've found the "small libraries" approach much better than the whole ecosystem tying itself to one web framework it can't even keep up with.

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#29

Post by bachmeier »

bmitc wrote: post #20
j13n wrote: post #13

It’s great to see reports of the excellent work Daniel Slutsky and others are doing to make data science more straightforward for everyone. I'm grateful that I get to benefit from these community efforts.

Good luck getting academics to adopt anything they don't know about, and all they know about is Python.

This is a strange comment that probably reflects the sliver of academics you're familiar with. Who do you think wrote and continues to develop R and all those packages? There are actually many types of software in use by academics.

Re: Clojure's machine learning ecosystem

#30

Post by lgrapenthin »

thih9 wrote: post #21
BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #12

For web server stuff, I still think Clojure is extremely solid. But I’ve come to really prefer Racket for general purpose programming. I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve. Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about i…

Very true. Also, while I agree that Clojure is solid for web server stuff, it wouldn’t be my first choice in the context of general purpose web apps or APIs. The “do-it-yourself” mentality that is at the core of Clojure dev culture results in a less rich library ecosystem. Not only you often end up writing custom code for a generic feature, the rest of your team cannot reuse their past experience but has to learn you…

What? If anything, we have a "do-it-right" mentality :) The Clojure library ecosystem is very rich with new libraries coming out every week. We also reuse the rich Java library ecosystem to a large degree. I'm with Clojure for 10+ years and I don't "often end up writing custom code for a generic feature". Its quite the opposite. Clojure is a language that has hundreds of extremely well composing generic functions built in, that operate on a very rich set of first class immutable datastructures. Whatever Clojure you base your impressions on is very different from the one I know and use...
Post reply on HN