Clojure for the Brave and True (2015) • Hacker News Board

bleah_yuck wrote: post #19

This book is painfully unfunny, filled with corny drawings and poorly structured with weak examples. I have the book, and I do not like it. I read it while learning, and returned to it only to realize what it did wrong, and why I learned nothing from it. It saddens me to see this post.

I would agree with you on unfunny and corny points, but I guess it is very much a personal taste issue. On the matter of substance I have found the book to be quite OK. Could you point to any specific examples of what it does "wrong"?

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#36

Post by westoncb » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 2:04 AM UTC

base698 wrote: post #26

thom wrote: post #25

I love Clojure, and have spent most of the last seven years in a Clojure REPL inside Emacs. But it still doesn't feel like critical mass has been reached. If anything, large efforts like Incanter have mostly died off, because most Clojure people are smart and resourceful enough to build their own stuff. There's an aversion to frameworks and a reliance on gluing together smaller libraries, which is totally valid as a…

Kind of reminds me of this: http://web.archive.org/web/20160304105922/http://www.lambdas... "Another feature about this guy is his low threshold of boredom. He'll pick up on a task and work frantically at it, accomplishing wonders in a short time and then get bored and drop it before its properly finished. He'll do nothing but strum his guitar and lie around in bed for several days after. That's also part of the patt…

That's a very nice essay—and unfortunately, I found myself described very accurately in it. I'm currently unemployed, sitting adjacent to a large pile of empty Indian food takeout bags, skimming a book on Abstract Algebra to better understand a paper on theory of deep neural networks—all of which has no connection to any lasting thing I'm doing aside from not working on a side project which happens to be at a local minimum of interest at the moment.

I wonder if anyone here has figured out good ways of compensating for this personality type, who has managed to somehow turnout relatively well-adjusted in spite of it ;)

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#37

Post by mac01021 » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 2:32 AM UTC

atarian wrote: post #9

decebalus1 wrote: post #4

I don't know what's wrong with me but I gave Clojure 3 tries in the past and every time I try to actually build something (aside from 4clojure and solving hackerrank problems with it) I get lost in the tooling and just give up then fallback to familiar frameworks\languages. It just doesn't click with me and the whole leinengen\ring\compojure just seems weird and backhanded.

It's not just you. I also find it very difficult to make anything useful with Clojure outside of practice problems.

What have you tried to make?

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#38

Post by shadowmint » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 2:32 AM UTC

I didn't enjoy this book; the examples used clojure constructs before introducing what they did making them arcane and difficult to understand, and it focused on the language without showing why you would use it or how to use it for real world projects.

It's like... a detailed guide to the language, for people who already know clojure.

I recommend 'Living Clojure' by Carin Meier for new comers.

(Also, avoid the clojure cookbook; it's just a list of 'how to do X' for a bunch of X questions, kind of like a FAQ of best practices; it's in no way an introduction to the language)

Like rust, I feel if you want to push someone into using clojure you have to pitch it at them with more than just 'hey look at this syntax. So functional!'. I know the clojurescript people are all enthusiastic these days, but the strength of clojure is its concurrency and seemless interop with the java ecosystem; if you don't need those, it's just another lisp.

You lose both of those with clojurescript, and I fail to any benefit in it. /shrug

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#39

Post by shadowmint » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 2:42 AM UTC

bootload wrote: post #5

Really appreciate the access to the book online http://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/ more likely to buy products that you can see. This years challenge, learn two new languages. Clojure might be one of them. The reason? Lisp based and in spite of the fact it uses cough , Java (JVM), it runs on JavaScript. A better language to run/work with JavaScript. That is a good enough reason to learn and u…

I hear this a lot, but it totally mystifies me.

You lose all the good parts of clojure when you go into the js runtime; stm, parallel processing, java interop, hot reloading, and it pulls in some really quite large js dependencies, and it's impossible to debug. Even console logging becomes a case of 'convert to readable object and log' using special helpers.

What's the benefit?

I don't see any meaningful reason to use clojure in this context; what's the draw? Why would you bother over any other compiles-to-js language?

You.. just like the syntax? That's the best answer I've gotten so far.

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#40

Post by cutler » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 2:48 AM UTC

throwaway7645 wrote: post #23

madmax96 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind if I ask what isn't clicking? I've had the exact opposite experience, and have found it very easy to incorporate different libraries. Do you have experience with other lisps? There's certainly a learning curve with clojure and its frameworks.

Everything assumes you're a Java expert.

I came from Perl with zero Java when I learned Clojure and found it very easy. That was 3 years ago and apart from the occasional Integer/parseInt I've hardly ever needed to dip into Java. As Clojure is a dynamic language it's a much cleaner departure from Java than Scala or Groovy where OOP still plays a big part. Clojure can be a truly liberating experience if you've spent most of your programming life working within the OOP straightjacket.