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Why I ever wrote Clojure

thesoftwarephilosopher.com

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Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#21

Post by rednafi »

Relatable. I’ve been writing code for soulless corps for about seven years, and it can get exhausting. Add politics and the endless rat race for promotions, and you have a recipe for making good people either really bored or really unhappy.

I need the money to get by, but at the same time, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about writing yet another RPC service or RESTful CRUD. This is partly why ketamine-fueled principal engineers often decide to rearchitect the universe, add Rust to the network layer where it makes no sense, or go ham with SWIG interfaces.

A few things that have worked for me: switching stacks. I started in data science, moved to Python/Node backends, and then switched to distributed systems and databases using Go. Switching teams and companies can help, though more often you just end up trading one bad culture for another.

This is a hard problem to solve, and boredom is real. But the solution isn’t bringing in some funky, untested stuff just for the lolz. Too many teams allow engineers to make the stack look like a mandrill’s face and then suffer the consequences.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#24

Post by dunk010 »

daveliepmann wrote: post #2

>I suspect this is the real reason Clojure was created, I bet Rich was just really bored. I notice too that a noticeable number of people pick up Clojure because it's new and shiny. As a longtime Clojurian I find that attitude can be disappointing to run into, like when you realize a growing friendship will die because they're not serious about living in your city. I don't claim to know the man but the reasons Rich w…

I distinctly remember in one of his talks he said words to the effect of “I wrote corporate C++ and Java for years and eventually realised I had to do something else, or else quit the industry”. So he took a year long sabbatical and created Clojure.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#26

Post by runeblaze »

daxfohl wrote: post #18
runeblaze wrote: post #5

While I agree with the boredom premise (I was also bored!), the practicality of Clojure was also very important. In fact if I were to deploy something to prod today that is FP, then I either use Scala or Clojure. Fintech benefits from concurrency, immutability and all, so obviously there is much more nuance to "why fintech uses Clojure".

Doesn't everyone benefit from those things? I didn't follow the fintech call-out here. Is fintech really that much different from other fields? I worked in it for a couple years and the only big difference I saw is how much of a pain all the regulatory hurdles are.

Yep my phrasing was not the best :X. You might know better ("couple years"). However my anecdotal observation is that the end result is that fintech drifts FP (heavy concurrency + immutability, ledgers and all) than your "average" tech. I genuinely don't know why, maybe correctness guarantees and ledgers are just so important.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#27

Post by zem »

rads wrote: post #8

Such a low quality article. The whole comment thread is just going to be about the flamebait of "I bet Rich was just really bored". Instead, the author could have listed the reasons they actually "loved it, and by the end I hated it", which would have led to an interesting discussion.

I think it's unfortunate they threw the bit about hickey in there; the part about a shiny new language helping relieve the tedium of enterprise software was a good one

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#28

Post by froh »

new languages are created to push the boundaries for manageable essential complexity, by reducing "accidental" complexity.

clojure's data structures for example enable simpler concurrent work on stupid enterprise data.

however.

I've seen favorite hot fancy XYZ bit rot in large enterprise code bases. the oh so bored original author long gone. boring architecture documentation missing. business critical underdocumented unmaintainable genius code. and I'll kneecap every greenhorn that tries to add such bored kid complexity in my vicinity.

get me right: rust and clojure and friends are great tools and you'll have my back if and where they are needed and add value. then we'll go all in. but no bored kid complexity. go and find yourselves some niche product companies, non enterprise, with hard tricky problems to solve and do genius programming there.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#30

Post by perrygeo »

It turns out Clojure is just a really good programming language, not a panacea. If you have to build soul-sucking software, it still sucks even in a great language. Technical cleverness isn't enough to distract you from a bullshit job forever.
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