Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nowadays you can use GraalVM to have quick startup time for commandline tools with Clojure.
KNow of any good tutorials for how to use Graal with Clojure?
Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
201–210 of 306 posts
Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of just measuring how many developers adopt Clojure and how difficult/easy that is, I'd also love a measure of how many developers Clojure "puts out of business". IME Clojure is quite aggressive on that front. In 2017 a customer wanted a set of services written in Clojure. Based on their Java experience they wanted to hire 10 devs. When I arrived they had 4, over the 1.5-year period I was there, they hired an…
Were they fired because they weren’t good enough at Clojure? Perhaps all Clojure did was filter out less capable performers. The small team of skilled developers might have been just as fast in Java if they weren’t encumbered by the mediocre ones.
That’s still an argument in favor of Clojure. People spend loads of time and money trying to figure out how to do such filters. If it comes for free by choosing Clojure, that’s pretty great.
Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a rather ill-defined form of compilation; i.e., it's not clear what that form is. Compilation means translation from one language to another; every compiler does that. Transpile was born because people were used to the fact that the target language of many compilers is machine code, but it's entirely unnecessary to have a separate word for that, as it doesn't add any information. There could be a meaningful ter…
I think this is just the way human language generally works being that it is organic and messy. In my field, there are numerous overlapping and even contradictory terms. I like the added distinction "transpiler" provides as I immediately know what the author means. Or the author could just use the term "compiler" plus another sentence to describe which kind. Transpiler seems like the more efficient way to convey the…
There is no "kind" though. "It compiles C to JS" and "it transpiles C to JS" mean the exact same thing. No added clarification is necessary, because there is just no distinction between the terms. On the contrary, if people think that "transpilation" has some distinct meaning, they are just being confused about what compilation is.
Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
#204Clojure is a FP (Lisp) language based on RMDB theory, which is very suitable for dataflow and data-driven programming, so it is suitable for large-scale industrialized pipeline software development using Warehouse/Workshop Model model. https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
In the last ~18 months you have been /very/ energetic in promoting your theory here, I have some alerts since about a year and you are always popping up with the same link. Looking into your posting and commenting activity, there not much more. By now I guess that you have had enough exposure, but most of your comments and links to github have not sparkled a lot of interest or comment, and reception has been skeptica…
I noticed that you have not posted any useful technical comments in the last 100+ days. Sorry I didn't keep reading.
In fact, this theory has been unprecedentedly hot recently. Star and traffic on github have risen sharply. On 2020-02-27, it was published by editor on reddit/devopsish, and other clojure communities.
My theory is written for a few people who understand Chapter 2 of the "Code Complete" and can read it without reading other chapters, not for people who cannot understand Chapter 2 and focus on other chapters.
So I have stated in the article: I will not write too many application examples or patterns. Because people who like to read such articles can't learn my theory.Because they lack imagination.
```
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere.
---- Albert Einstein
Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clojure seems like an odd choice for command line tools. I can see why a committed Clojure programmer would want to reuse their existing skills for a slightly mismatching domain. But Rust/Go (even C) would seem like a more obvious choice if you weren't setting off from Clojure as a starting point.
Clojure's extensive support for lazy evaluation and sequences actually makes it decent for command line tools that process streams of data. At least in terms of program architecture and elegance. The biggest mismatch used to be startup time, but with GraalVM you can get very good startup times. I made a couple of simple command line programs at my previous workplace and the functional style of Clojure combined with l…
yep, borkdude has been playing with calling Rust from Clojure too via Java JNA, so if most of your application doesn't need rust like performance but one specific part of it does then you're not dead for options
Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were they fired because they weren’t good enough at Clojure? Perhaps all Clojure did was filter out less capable performers. The small team of skilled developers might have been just as fast in Java if they weren’t encumbered by the mediocre ones.
That’s still an argument in favor of Clojure. People spend loads of time and money trying to figure out how to do such filters. If it comes for free by choosing Clojure, that’s pretty great.
I doubt this filtering is in any way done by Clojure though. It's difficult to recognize top performers in interviews, but it's much easier to see that in day to day work. What is usually missing is the willingness to fire people for not being top performers.
Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
#207You need a well-organized linear pipeline system, this is "The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow v3.0 with Warehouse / Workshop Model"
I hope you realize that this is complete nonsense to anyone that isn't part of your new "new" functional programming cult. It has almost no semantic meaning.
You are too complicated.
```
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
---- Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming.
the first recipient of the Turing Award (1966)
A founding father of Computer Science as a separate discipline
Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
---- Albert Einstein
Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. Also, "referential transparency" doesn't mean what some FP people think it means [1]. Even though no language with macros is referentially transparent [2], Clojure, like all Lisps, is a poster child of referential opacity (opaqueness?), deriving much of its power from it. If you can quote code terms, you can't possibly be transparent with respect to reference (denotation). Saying "pure" or "without side-ef…
Could you elaborate on the part on "no language with macros is referentially transparent", specifically, do you mean that if macros can do IO, then the transparency isn't there anymore?
IO and side effects have aboslutely nothing to do with referential transparency. A referentially transparent expression is one whose subterms can be replaced with other subterms having the same meaning (reference) without changing the meaning of the expression. Hence, the expression -- a piece of syntax -- is transparent to its reference (denotation, or meaning). Change any piece with another with the same meaning, and the overall meaning is the same.
For example, Java is a referentially transparent language. Suppose we have:
int x;
int f() { x++; return 3; }
int g() { x++; return 3; }
(defn f [] 3)
(defn f [] 3)
(defmacro foo [x] (str x))
When some FP people say "referential transparency" they actually mean something else altogether. They mean that the meaning of a subroutine application that yields the value 3 is indistinguishable from the value 3. This is, indeed, not true in imperative languages like Java and Clojure, but this is called "value semantics" -- i.e. the meaning of any expression is just a value in the language -- or simply, being pure functional. Then why do they call it "referential transparency"? This has to do with social dynamics in the FP community that is eager to use mathematical-sounding terms but the people don't usually have the requisite mathematical understanding, so like in a game of telephone those terms are quickly used incorrectly and drift away from their correct meaning.
Natural language (see example in the link I posted in my previous comment), programming languages with macros and modal logics are not referentially transparent, because referential opacity adds more power to a language (Lisp can express computations that the lambda calculus cannot, thanks to macros). That FP people (who often rely on referential opacity) say referential transparency is a good thing is also a result of a compulsion in that community to take neutral mathematical definitions and assign them moral values. Referential trasnparency has some properties, some of them can be helpful in some circumstances and some can be harmful in other circumstances. In general, however, it is not a particularly important property one way or the other.
Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
#209The most interesting Clojure-like language around is, IMO, Carp[^1]. Carp is a Lisp written in Haskell that compiles down to C with Rust ownership semantics and looks like Clojure. So you get a GC-less Lisp with fast startup time that is suitable for game development with the safety guarantees of Rust. [^1]: https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp
I thought about including this since I saw a talk about it once where the guy referenced Clojure, but they don't talk about Clojure at all in the README.md.
Re: Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread
#210My personal perspective (after 8 years clojuring, half of that professionally) is that Clojure keeps progressing, with ever better tools and ideas for getting stuff done, optimally. I remain optimistic. At the same time, it still fails at my "golden test": can I gather 5 random freelance engineers and get them to ship a project within a few months, wasting almost no billable time? I can (and have) with Ruby, Typescri…
Your test is basically asking “is it similar to something popular”, there will always be a learning curve when changing to a new, different from what you’re used to, tool. In my personal experience, I’ve seen people go from no Clojure or functional programming knowledge to productive in a few weeks, that’s quicker than I’ve seen some people go from non-OO to OO (although I imagine it has more to do with the people than with the paradigms)