Try Clojure

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Thu, May 23, 2024, 4:31 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #165

neilyio wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get into REPL-driven development, the JVM startup time (which is often under a second for me anyways) is a total non-issue. You don't continuously restart your program to see changes or run tests. You can refresh all your state instantly without exiting. But before Babashka, that was indeed a barrier to using Clojure in shell scripts. Now we have it all!

In Unix it is customary to invoke tools from the Bash shell or Bash scripts. That doesn't mix well with a separate REPL.

Post by didibus » Thu, May 23, 2024, 4:34 AM UTC

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?

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Thu, May 23, 2024, 4:39 AM UTC

cess11 wrote: post #97

nine_k wrote: post #79

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As a side note, I'm always amazed by people who can use a highly expressive language (Clojure, Rust, even TS) but switch to Go when they feel like it (especially pre-1.18). To me, switching to a less expressive language is painful and infuriating. I remember having to switch from Python to Java 5, and how everything started to take 3 to 5 times longer code to express. Maybe the key thing is to only write small things…

Java has had lambdas, map/filter/reduce and other stuff for like ten years or so I think. It's a bit chatty for sure, but that's what you want sometimes, the verbosity can make it easier for newcomers to make changes and additions. To me it isn't more infuriating than learning a new language or practicing one I'm not very good at. There's a bit of friction, but that's common when I'm developing in the languages I'm m…

Post by didibus » Thu, May 23, 2024, 5:01 AM UTC

tmtvl wrote: post #174

So here's something which I, as a Lisper, don't understand: Clojure has syntax for hash tables (the curly braces), why doesn't it use those for let-bindings, instead choosing to use vector syntax? (Of course I prefer standard Lisp syntax which can easily be extended for multiple-value and destructuring bindings: (let ((a 1) ((b c) (list 2 3)) (d e (values 4 5))) `#(,a ,b ,c ,d ,e)) ;; => #(1 2 3 4 5)

    (let [a 1
          [b c] (list 2 3)
          [d e] [4 5]]
      `(~a ~b ~c ~d ~e))
    ;; => (1 2 3 4 5)

Post by didibus » Thu, May 23, 2024, 5:05 AM UTC

winrid wrote: post #164

rads wrote: post #144

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This is a good starting point if you want to get a web app going quickly: https://biffweb.com It uses XTDB by default but you can switch to Postgres: https://biffweb.com/p/how-to-use-postgres-with-biff/ People don't really use ORMs in Clojure, they just write SQL directly and abstract the details from consumers using functions. That said, HoneySQL is a common alternative to writing SQL that makes it a lot less painfu…

Biff looks neat, thanks! I mainly just don't want to write raw sql/mappers to structures for simple queries. Looks like most sql libraries with clojure can just return maps so that's neat.