31–40 of 87 posts
Something I really like in the Clojure data science stack that isn't mentioned is Clerk* — an interesting take on notebooks. I think it's a good gateway into Clojure for those coming from a Python or R background. * https://clerk.vision/
It’s great to see reports of the excellent work Daniel Slutsky and others are doing to make data science more straightforward for everyone. I'm grateful that I get to benefit from these community efforts.
Good luck getting academics to adopt anything they don't know about, and all they know about is Python.
For web server stuff, I still think Clojure is extremely solid. But I’ve come to really prefer Racket for general purpose programming. I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve. Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about i…
The big push for people to use the Clojure CLI tool seems like shooting themselves in the foot.
If you're familiar with Java, then you can think of Clojure today as going through its Apache Ant phase. Some people love it, some people hate it. I personally want to spend 0% of my time building build tools; thankfully there is a pretty solid build tool that is still maintained and will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
I remember there used to be so much excitement about Clojure - it certainly was the "tech du jour" for a long while, also on the HN front page. It was the "...in Rust" of its day. But is it just me or has it gotten awfully quiet around Clojure? I mean, it is of course expected that no novelty can stay in the lime light forever. But what has become of all of the excitement? My impression is that Clojure failed to live…
I would not say it is such a small niche. There are job openings here and there. It is much easier to find a Clojure job than a F# or a Haskell job in my experience. This may be of course different depending on your location. The problem is that an entire ecosystem is more than just a new language. Clojure has some really interesting libraries, but the rest relies on Java. It is a good ecosystem nonetheless. Julia is…
However to be honest anecdotally I do think even if they aren't going down in user terms, FP languages are losing percentage market share. From my personal experience FP is no longer new; the hype of FP in general has died down. The hype has moved onto other things over the years (e.g. AI, blockchain, bare metal technologies that enable the above, etc etc).
I'm not saying FP doesn't have a lot of value. I enjoy, particularly when the program calls for it, FP languages like F#, Scala, etc. They still offer a lot of value IMO for all the usual spouted reasons.
IMO I just think the hype has moved from technologies that do things better (i.e. more efficient, less error prone, makes my job easier, etc) to technologies that do shiny new things. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them aren't in fact technical but economic and political (e.g. management). Things like less jobs globally in tech (meaning my skills need to have wider reach), demand for specialist roles that aren't as language focused, etc play a part. Mainstream languages taking FP features as well makes the return vs risk of using a FP language even worse of a tradeoff - there's less perceived return for changing stack than before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big push for people to use the Clojure CLI tool seems like shooting themselves in the foot.
I still use Leiningen since it covers practically all of my needs, including the needs of the teams in the past two businesses I've worked for. The Slack group has pretty vocal people pushing for deps.edn. It's a bit amusing seeing people slowly build their own Leiningen out of ad-hoc Makefile^W^W Babashka scripts and copy-pasting build.clj files across their projects. (Not to mention, nobody can remember what the -X…
I started with lein, and still use lein for any 'production ready' project, but I'll use deps.edn for little personal scripts because in those cases lein feels like bloat. For me, using deps.edn was straightforward because of my previous experience with lein.
There is a lot of strange shade in the Clojure community; like that thrown at lein.
In addition to lein, the ones that get me a lot of negative attention are the community's opinion that (loop ) is an antipattern in spite of it being more performant than the comparable built-in functional patterns, and (first ) and (second ) being preferable to (nth )s in spite of (nth )s also being more performant.
If Clojure compiled to native code by default, instead of relying on the JVM, it'd be much more attractive to me. I know many people don't care about this...
For web server stuff, I still think Clojure is extremely solid. But I’ve come to really prefer Racket for general purpose programming. I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve. Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about i…
1) The language evolving all the time is an anti-feature. Clojure is an oasis for the people who are tired of having their knowledge obsoleted by constant change that doesn't really improve anything. People can build whatever weird and wonderful features they want using macros in their own library.
2) deps/edn - the design seems to support toolmakers more than end users. I hated it myself (tinged by poor documentation at the time which has since been remedied). But for anyone else having similar issues; the answer is to jump to leiningen [0] which is by far an easier way to set up a Clojure project.
Deps is ok, but lein is what I'd recommend to anyone as a starting point.
I remember there used to be so much excitement about Clojure - it certainly was the "tech du jour" for a long while, also on the HN front page. It was the "...in Rust" of its day. But is it just me or has it gotten awfully quiet around Clojure? I mean, it is of course expected that no novelty can stay in the lime light forever. But what has become of all of the excitement? My impression is that Clojure failed to live…
My last few jobs were in clojure so jobs do exist, moreso than in Common Lisp and Haskell at least (probably). There aren't very many companies that use it relative to the programming world at large, so I'd say you're right on that front.
I'm happy using it and will continue using it. Sometimes I encounter interesting ideas and libraries that I end up using.
At the end of the day, it's a programming language. You can write interesting things on uninteresting or even subjectively awful languages and boring things on interesting languages.
Here's something I've been working on for the last two weeks: https://keyboards.justbuythisthing.com/. If I didn't tell you I wrote it in clojure, no one would know. It could very well be PHP.
If Clojure compiled to native code by default, instead of relying on the JVM, it'd be much more attractive to me. I know many people don't care about this...
You could probably achieve that via GraalVM I would think.