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Try Clojure

tryclojure.org

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Re: Try Clojure

#21

Post by resource_waste »

netbioserror wrote: post #16
pants2 wrote: post #8

Cool site, I've never tried Clojure before. My first reaction though is that (+ 1 1) is a highly unconventional and possibly confusing way of writing 1+1, and I'm not sure why that design choice came about.

In prefix notation (which has been around for a very long time) the operation comes first. Think of it as the "addition" function being applied to the arguments following it. This matches how nearly all programming languages are broken down into their abstract syntax trees while compiling. As an added bonus, you now know Lisp. This is how all Lisp syntax works: `(function arg1 arg2 ...)`. That's literally it.

[flagged]

Re: Try Clojure

#22

Post by d4mi3n »

drpossum wrote: post #4

I love clojure, but it's really lost a lot of the momentum it had as many imperative languages have adopted parts of functional programming (and much for the better) over the last many years. On the other side I've felt a lot of the ecosystem work that was done has a more "timeless" quality. Coupled with java interop I haven't ever felt wanting when I do reach for it for some hobby projects I keep up with. One thing…

In my experience, the subsets of the community around clojure were one of the biggest problem with it. It's gotten better over the years, but circa 2016 - 2018 it had a spike in popularity despite being very hostile to newcomers.

There was an almost apologist attitude towards rough edges or failure modes folks new to the community would fall into. I managed to work with it for a time despite that, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It's really important to make your ecosystem and communities welcome to new users or they're destined to fade.

Re: Try Clojure

#23

Post by [deleted] »

pants2 wrote: post #8

Cool site, I've never tried Clojure before. My first reaction though is that (+ 1 1) is a highly unconventional and possibly confusing way of writing 1+1, and I'm not sure why that design choice came about.

[deleted]

Re: Try Clojure

#24

Post by [deleted] »

pants2 wrote: post #8

Cool site, I've never tried Clojure before. My first reaction though is that (+ 1 1) is a highly unconventional and possibly confusing way of writing 1+1, and I'm not sure why that design choice came about.

[deleted]

Re: Try Clojure

#25

Post by hombre_fatal »

askonomm wrote: post #7
hombre_fatal wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's even better for an onboarding tutorial. I didn't know it existed (used Clojure for 6 years a long time ago). Cool: https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ I always thought that the surrounding tooling (having to learn how to edit parens productively, using nrepl/cider, maybe even emacs... with evil-mode of course) to be both the worst and then eventually the best parts of Clojure.

I'm one of those mainstream devs (who also did Clojure for 6 years, coincidentally) who never got into emacs, and always just used the Cursive IDE plugin for IntelliJ and its Parinfer editing mode. I know I probably didn't unlock true god mode of productivity, but it worked fine for me.

I had already used vim by the time I found clojure during uni (back when I had the energy to learn major new things), but vim support sucked for things like evaluating code blocks in the buffer, so I tried emacs and immediately slapped on evil-mode (vim bindings inside emacs).

For those six years I don't think I used emacs keybindings during that time except to move between files and execute clojure code. I couldn't be arsed to learn it. It was basically a fancier vim, haha.

These days I use VSCode for all software. At some point in my 20s I found out there's life outside of coding so now I use a less esoteric editor. I'm sure its clojure / nrepl / paredit / parinfer support is fine. (Seems to be this: https://calva.io/) Back in 2010 the options weren't as great.

Re: Try Clojure

#27

Post by widdershins »

pants2 wrote: post #8

Cool site, I've never tried Clojure before. My first reaction though is that (+ 1 1) is a highly unconventional and possibly confusing way of writing 1+1, and I'm not sure why that design choice came about.

Using the same notation for function calls and math operators has many benefits that may not be immediately obvious, and which may (depending on preference) outweigh the unfamiliarity. For example:

No operator precedence rules to remember.

Use math operators in higher order functions:

    (reduce [1 2 3] +)
    (compose + \*)
Simpler parser in the language.

Use kebab-case variable names.

Use most symbols in variable names.

The last two are because of reduced ambiguity in the language. The benefits for readability can be huge. For example, I love question marks for predicates in Scheme.

    (vector? x)
    (filter [1 2 3 4 5] odd?)
I'm sure there are more benefits that I haven't thought of.

Re: Try Clojure

#28

Post by amanaplanacanal »

resource_waste wrote: post #21
netbioserror wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In prefix notation (which has been around for a very long time) the operation comes first. Think of it as the "addition" function being applied to the arguments following it. This matches how nearly all programming languages are broken down into their abstract syntax trees while compiling. As an added bonus, you now know Lisp. This is how all Lisp syntax works: `(function arg1 arg2 ...)`. That's literally it.

[flagged]

Calling it unreadable is a stretch. It’s just using the same syntax for all functions, instead of having something special for arithmetic.

Re: Try Clojure

#29

Post by UlisesAC4 »

pants2 wrote: post #8

Cool site, I've never tried Clojure before. My first reaction though is that (+ 1 1) is a highly unconventional and possibly confusing way of writing 1+1, and I'm not sure why that design choice came about.

Basically you are writing in Trees more on that here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_notation

Re: Try Clojure

#30

Post by bunderbunder »

d4mi3n wrote: post #22
drpossum wrote: post #4

I love clojure, but it's really lost a lot of the momentum it had as many imperative languages have adopted parts of functional programming (and much for the better) over the last many years. On the other side I've felt a lot of the ecosystem work that was done has a more "timeless" quality. Coupled with java interop I haven't ever felt wanting when I do reach for it for some hobby projects I keep up with. One thing…

In my experience, the subsets of the community around clojure were one of the biggest problem with it. It's gotten better over the years, but circa 2016 - 2018 it had a spike in popularity despite being very hostile to newcomers. There was an almost apologist attitude towards rough edges or failure modes folks new to the community would fall into. I managed to work with it for a time despite that, but it left me with…

A somewhat similar thing I ran into is that existing Clojure code can be incredibly difficult to grok if you don't already know the language very well.

Some of this comes from lisp's minimalist syntax, which makes it hard to even know what kind of thing you're looking at when you're encountering a new thing for the first time. But the problem is also compounded by some of Clojure's more distinctive (and powerful) features such as ad-hoc polymorphism and using maps to pass function arguments.

The closest analogy from imperative languages that I can think of is another language that's famous for being incredibly productive in the hands of a skilled user, but whose code tends to feel kind of write-only: Perl.

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