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Try Clojure

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Re: Try Clojure

#221

Post by rtpg »

ryan-duve wrote: post #170
tastyminerals2 wrote: post #152

I have to admit, several years ago, a colleague of mine advised me if not to try Clojure but at least to read the "History of Clojure": https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321 , which I never did. But one day I decided to watch Rich Hickey - Greatest Hits https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits ... I then read the "History of Clojure", and then jumped into learning it. This is probably one of the mo…

I got what you described by learning Common Lisp just a few months ago. Do you think learning Clojure would get me something in addition to that or is it roughly the same?

I think Clojure leans into immutability a lot, and that leads to more interesting APIs and norms that are valuable. CL has always felt a bit more.... "running on a machine" that I feel has less of a place in an era where everyone and their dog has functional programming essentials built in.

Clojure is interesting, but some Clojure APIs (stuff like Spectre) is "I want this everywhere now" stuff.

Re: Try Clojure

#222

Post by joshlemer »

wredue wrote: post #153
grumpyprole wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's painful for the compiler too, it has to turn the parents imperative code into SSA (essentially A-normal form) so it can optimise it!

You guys can make all the baloney claims about this you want. The day that Haskell stops being 10x slower than languages providing mutable data is the day we can start to seriously entertain your claims.

I think the persistent collections are generally worth the cost. IIRC, for HAMT maps/sets for instance, they're about twice as slow for reads and four times as slow for writes. For bulk updates, you can also slip into using transients, and then when you're done, "freeze" it back into a persistent data structure.

I only wish that the transient collections would support more different kinds of writes, like support all operations on java.util.List/Set/Map kind of thing. Forget which ones aren't present but I remember there being a couple...

Re: Try Clojure

#223

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

Clojure is a really interesting and well designed language with bad error messages and bad official tooling. It feels very sloppy.

Compared to Go, it has a weak stdlib, is more memory intensive, and generally slower. You get beautifully concise code but it can be very hard to follow (or return to after time away).

Go can look completely idiotic or unbelievably focused and practical, depending on the light. It is painful to give up Clojure’s very strong selling points but I find alternatives to be more pragmatic.

Re: Try Clojure

#224

Post by kamaal »

pron wrote: post #190
amelius wrote: post #151

> unlike full-JVM Clojure it has a very fast startup time I can't believe that after all these years Java still didn't fix their startup time.

The JVM cold-starts, loads a Hello, World program from a compressed JAR, runs it and shuts down in 40ms. But Clojure compiles quite a bit of Clojure code generating hundreds if not thousands of classes and then loads them before starting up the Clojure program. Still, there's ongoing work on the JVM (Project Leyden [1]) to speed up both startup and warmup even of such programs by caching more state. [1]: E.g. see htt…

>>The JVM cold-starts, loads a Hello, World program from a compressed JAR, runs it and shuts down in 40ms.

Im yet to reach the X-men level super qualities that can detect, and work in 40 ms chunks. Or at least even notice a 40 ms delays.

I envy the humans who can notice such small chunks of time.

Re: Try Clojure

#226

Post by hluska »

astrashe2 wrote: post #139
crispyambulance wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...had a spike in popularity despite being very hostile to newcomers. To be fair the community itself, as humans, was very welcoming to newcomers. Really super nice and helpful folks. If anything was "hostile" it was the dominance of emacs and very limited options for other tooling. That, and the horrifically unhelpful leaky abstractions in the stack trace when something went wrong. It's a big step, if you don't al…

This matches my experience as an amateur programmer. The initial hill was steep, but I don't think it was because people weren't friendly. There is one cultural thing that might be confused with unfriendliness. Sometimes people react badly if someone posts incorrect information. But I think that's good. When you search for information about Python or PHP you have to wade through quite a bit of junk. Ironically, it's…

People posting the wrong information is a great opportunity for a community to explain why it’s wrong. We lost that take on community and it’s a major loss for our entire industry. It’s remarkably hard for people to figure out why they’re wrong when they’re wrong.

I don’t think the solution is the Usenet-esque “you are wrong and your breeding is suspect” way. But there’s a very good place in the middle and I’d really like to find that place.

Business wise, I think we’re using the wrong paradigm in some major places. Maybe we can beat that while I’m still alive and that would be a net win for our whole craft.

Re: Try Clojure

#227

Post by iLemming »

ryan-duve wrote: post #170
tastyminerals2 wrote: post #152

I have to admit, several years ago, a colleague of mine advised me if not to try Clojure but at least to read the "History of Clojure": https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321 , which I never did. But one day I decided to watch Rich Hickey - Greatest Hits https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits ... I then read the "History of Clojure", and then jumped into learning it. This is probably one of the mo…

I got what you described by learning Common Lisp just a few months ago. Do you think learning Clojure would get me something in addition to that or is it roughly the same?

> Do you think learning Clojure would get me something in addition to that

For me, the biggest benefit is that it's hosted. Learning only Clojure, I can easily today write for JVM, .NET, JavaScript, Flutter, or shell scripts. Even when I need to write Lua, I'd usually pick Fennel. It's not Clojure but feels very similar. There are libs that can give you Python or R interop from Clojure. There are projects to target Golang, Rust or Erlang. Jank is a super interesting, experimental implementation of Clojure that runs on LLVM, I'm very excited about it. Do you want to become a true polyglot programmer? You only need to learn Clojure.

Re: Try Clojure

#228

Post by iLemming »

talkingtab wrote: post #74

I know many people will have problems with this post, but I am posting as information for clorjure-ophiles. Not reasons, but personal reasons why I don't do Clojure and will not try it. 1. When I read about Clojure (repeatedly) I like it. I am especially interested in transducers. I even built a half baked transducer engine in JavaScript using generators. There is clearly something here of value here. Any system that…

Slowly repeat after me... "Java and JVM are not the same thing." Do it ten times every morning.. jk. JVM always gets a bad rap because of Java. Matter of fact, JVM is an incredibly good piece of tech.

Re: Try Clojure

#230

Post by iLemming »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #48

I'm happy with TypeScript, Go, and Rust. Don't feel like learning anything else.

> Don't feel like learning anything else.

If you need to do graphql in typescript, you still "learning a new language". If you're using Prisma or you doing css-in-js, or rxjs, or tRPC, or Cypress, you're still "learning a new language".

You're basically moving from having to understand one (seemingly arbitrarily composed) syntax to another (seemingly arbitrarily composed) syntax. While I learned Clojure syntax once, and now only have to learn paradigms and techniques - logic, pattern-matching, concurrency, reactive dataflow, polymorphic dispatch, metaprogramming, event-driven programming, state management, etc. etc.

My hope is that I never have to use TypeScript, Go, or Rust daily since Clojure already gives me everything I need to write programs. It simply makes much better sense for the type of programs I'm writing today. Someday that may change, but I doubt that any of those would suddenly start making better sense to use. It probably will be something else, not these.

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