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Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my case, it was definitely worth becoming uncomfortable for a bit to learn Clojure because I was very uncomfortable with the experience of many of the other languages. It’s also great to have endless backwards compatibility and little reliance on changing external libraries baked in.
Never opposed to sacrificing some comfort for learning.
Ultimately, it all comes down to build what you're comfortable with. Additionally, when you're managing large organizations and teams. Build with what you can hire quickly for and easily scale with.
Is there a technical reason I can't sign into Studio with email? I'll really try to avoid signing in with other platforms, but I'll consider Github if there's some reason it has to be. I'll never sign into a service with Google.
I only use google for email logins for services I don't take seriously and am willing to lose.
Interesting story. I am not entirely convinced that all credit should go to the programming language here, though. My theory is that communicating abstractions is hard. If you work on your own, or in a (very) small team, you can come up with powerful abstractions that allow you to build amazing systems, quickly. However, sharing the underlying ideas and philosophy with new team members can be daunting. As systems gro…
Rapid application technologies, methedologies, or frameworks are not unusual.
I know some wonderfully productive polyglot developers who by their own choice end up at Clojure. It doesn't have to be for everyone.
I wouldn't rule out that Clojure doesn't deserve credit. I wouldn't think it's a good idea to discredit Clojure from not having tried it myself.
I do hope someone with extensive Clojure experience can weigh in on the advantages.
How easy something is a codebase grows is something to really consider.
This product regardless of how it's built is pretty impressive. I'd be open to learning advantages and comparisons without denying it.
Interesting story. I am not entirely convinced that all credit should go to the programming language here, though. My theory is that communicating abstractions is hard. If you work on your own, or in a (very) small team, you can come up with powerful abstractions that allow you to build amazing systems, quickly. However, sharing the underlying ideas and philosophy with new team members can be daunting. As systems gro…
I believe once you've got to some point, dealing with abstractions is a way of life. It's either in the language, the technical requirements, or the software design.
Interesting story. I am not entirely convinced that all credit should go to the programming language here, though. My theory is that communicating abstractions is hard. If you work on your own, or in a (very) small team, you can come up with powerful abstractions that allow you to build amazing systems, quickly. However, sharing the underlying ideas and philosophy with new team members can be daunting. As systems gro…
Languages need a window of opportunity, and many of those squandered it.
Clojure won over Scala because at the time when people were loooking for an alternative JVM langauge, Clojure was more of a departure from Java and seemed to have better tooling (compile times and syntax support) than Scala.
Smalltalk and Common Lisp wasted their moment by not being cheap/free to people using micros in the 1980s.
Lisp, especially, very much wasted its moment with micros. The fact that no Lisper had the vision to dump a Lisp onto the bank switched micros (which makes GC really easy and useful) of the mid to late 1980s is a self-inflicted bullet wound. Lots of us hated doing assembly language programming but had no real alternative. This was a loss born of pure arrogance of Lispers who looked down on those micros as not being "real machines".
I weep for all the hours I wasted doing assembly language as a teenager that I could have been writing Lisp. How much software could have been written that would have been <100 lines of Lisp if only someone had written that tool?
Interesting story. I am not entirely convinced that all credit should go to the programming language here, though. My theory is that communicating abstractions is hard. If you work on your own, or in a (very) small team, you can come up with powerful abstractions that allow you to build amazing systems, quickly. However, sharing the underlying ideas and philosophy with new team members can be daunting. As systems gro…
> It may also clarify why more powerful languages such as Scala, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, etc, consistently fail to pick up steam. Languages need a window of opportunity, and many of those squandered it. Clojure won over Scala because at the time when people were loooking for an alternative JVM langauge, Clojure was more of a departure from Java and seemed to have better tooling (compile times and syntax supp…
I kind of fail to see Lisp as an alternative to assembler on mid 80s micros.
Though, there were several cheap Lisps for PCs...
However my criteria for selecting a language for use in a professional context:
0: fit to task - obviously the language has to be able to do the job - to take this seriously you must define the job and what its requirements are and map those against the candidate languages
1: hiring and recruiting - there must be a mainstream sized talent pool - talent shortages are not acceptable - and I don't buy the argument that "smart people are attracted to non mainstream languages which is how we find smart people", it is simply not true that "most smart people program with Scala/Haskell/Elixir/whatever" - there's smart and smarter working on the mainstream languages.
2: size of programming community, size of knowledge base, size of open source community - don't end up with a code base stuck in an obscure corner of the Internet where few people know what is going on
3: AI - how well can AI program in this language? The size of the training set counts here - all the mainstream languages have had vast amounts of knowledge ingested and thus Claude can write decent code or at least has a shot at it. And in future this will likely get better again based on volume of training data. AI counts for a huge amount - if you are using a language that the AI knows little about then there's little productivity related benefits coming to your development team.
4: tools, IDE support, linters, compilers, build tools etc. It's a real obstacle to fire up your IDE and find that the IDE knows nothing about the language you are using, or that the language plugin was written by some guy who did it for the love and its not complete or professional or updated or something.
5: hiring and recruiting - it's the top priority and the bottom and every priority in between. If you can't find the people then you are in big trouble I have seen this play out over and over where the CTO's favorite non-mainstream language is used in a professional context and for years - maybe decades after the company suffers trying to find people. And decades after the CTO moved on to a new company and a new favorite language.
So what is a mainstream language? Arguable but personally it looks like Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, Golang. To a lesser extent Ruby only because Ruby developers have always been hard to find even though there is lots of community and knowledge and tools etc. Rust seems to have remained somewhat niche when its peer Golang has grown rapidly. Probably C and C++ depending on context. Maybe Kotlin? How cares what I think anyway its up to you. My main point is - in a professional context the language should be chosen to service the needs of the business. Be systematic and professional and don't bring your hobbies into it because the business needs come first.
And for home/hobbies/fun? Do whatever the heck you like.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quick (and cheap?) hires are not necessarily good hires. In my experience (and my theory) developer productivity can range from 0.5x to 5x and more, and those developers in the upper range tend to look for certain programming language which they enjoy, like Rust, Go, Elixir, Scala and Clojure. They are hard to get if you are on a "boring" stack like Java, NodeJS, PHP. So if you might need to invest some time and mone…
I find the opposite to be true, that best and most productive developers tend to be more language agnostic than average, although I'm not saying they don't have their preferences. Specifically, I find language evangelists particularly likely to be closer to .5x than 5x. And that's before you even account for their tendency to push for rewriting stuff that already works, because " is the future, it's going to be great…