I’ve been using Clojure for almost 10 years and it still feels like a foreign language to me. I call it “parenthetical hell”.
My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
31–40 of 204 posts
Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
#32With respect, this topic in particular has been beaten to death. I too liked Clojure when I tried it some years ago (agreed on the composition and data structures; both are _great_). But the real value-add is in the runtime, not the syntax. Java has a solid runtime but it's not yet as good as Erlang's, maybe even not up to the standards of Golang -- I am talking concurrency / parallelism here (for memory management I…
> Programming language syntax scarcely matters. It does to some extent but we the programmers tend to over-romanticize it. The runtime and its properties are the much better thing to optimize for.
I'm not sure I understand this argument. Java and Clojure share a runtime, but an idiomatic Java codebase is going to have a very different architecture and design to an idiomatic Clojure codebase. Conversely, a codebase written in Go may end up looking very similar to a codebase written in Java, despite using different runtimes.
Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
#33With respect, this topic in particular has been beaten to death. I too liked Clojure when I tried it some years ago (agreed on the composition and data structures; both are _great_). But the real value-add is in the runtime, not the syntax. Java has a solid runtime but it's not yet as good as Erlang's, maybe even not up to the standards of Golang -- I am talking concurrency / parallelism here (for memory management I…
> Programming language syntax scarcely matters. It does to some extent but we the programmers tend to over-romanticize it. The runtime and its properties are the much better thing to optimize for. I'm not sure I understand this argument. Java and Clojure share a runtime, but an idiomatic Java codebase is going to have a very different architecture and design to an idiomatic Clojure codebase. Conversely, a codebase wr…
I mean runtime guarantees and features. In this case: effortless / near-invisible concurrency and parallelism.
As mentioned, I did like Clojure. I'd switch to it if it was running inside the Erlang runtime (like Elixir does).
Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Programming language syntax scarcely matters. It does to some extent but we the programmers tend to over-romanticize it. The runtime and its properties are the much better thing to optimize for. I'm not sure I understand this argument. Java and Clojure share a runtime, but an idiomatic Java codebase is going to have a very different architecture and design to an idiomatic Clojure codebase. Conversely, a codebase wr…
I mean runtime guarantees and features. In this case: effortless / near-invisible concurrency and parallelism. As mentioned, I did like Clojure. I'd switch to it if it was running inside the Erlang runtime (like Elixir does).
To be clear, I'm not questioning your choice of runtime or language. I'm just curious why you think that "Programming language syntax scarcely matters", as to me that seems the same as saying "How a codebase is architectured and designed scarcely matters".
Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Programming language syntax scarcely matters. It does to some extent but we the programmers tend to over-romanticize it. The runtime and its properties are the much better thing to optimize for. I'm not sure I understand this argument. Java and Clojure share a runtime, but an idiomatic Java codebase is going to have a very different architecture and design to an idiomatic Clojure codebase. Conversely, a codebase wr…
I mean runtime guarantees and features. In this case: effortless / near-invisible concurrency and parallelism. As mentioned, I did like Clojure. I'd switch to it if it was running inside the Erlang runtime (like Elixir does).
I can't endorse it because I've never used it, but: https://zread.ai/clojerl/clojerl/12-clojure-to-erlang-code-g...
Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean runtime guarantees and features. In this case: effortless / near-invisible concurrency and parallelism. As mentioned, I did like Clojure. I'd switch to it if it was running inside the Erlang runtime (like Elixir does).
To be clear, I'm not questioning your choice of runtime or language. I'm just curious why you think that "Programming language syntax scarcely matters", as to me that seems the same as saying "How a codebase is architectured and designed scarcely matters".
I don't see how the latter follows from the former? The former is much bigger and more abstract; syntax is just one of the vehicles to try and codify it.
F.ex. if you have an universal construct of green threads / fibers then 7 PLs could express it 7 different ways, yet underneath they'd all be the same.
Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear, I'm not questioning your choice of runtime or language. I'm just curious why you think that "Programming language syntax scarcely matters", as to me that seems the same as saying "How a codebase is architectured and designed scarcely matters".
I don't see how the latter follows from the former? The former is much bigger and more abstract; syntax is just one of the vehicles to try and codify it. F.ex. if you have an universal construct of green threads / fibers then 7 PLs could express it 7 different ways, yet underneath they'd all be the same.
The programming language informs the design of the system. As I said in my earlier comment, an idiomatic Java codebase is going to be designed very differently to an idiomatic Clojure codebase, even if they both intend to solve the same problem.
Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
#38Once you learn Clojure's syntax and semantics, you're no longer bound to the JVM. There's ClojureScript (JS), ClojureCLR, ClojureDart, jank (C++), Basilisp (Python), babashka (SCI), and many others. This means that, if you don't know Java or don't like the JVM, you can likely use Clojure wherever you already feel most comfortable.
For the most part, any Clojure code which doesn't use host interop will work on all dialects. Clojure also has support for conditional code, depending on the current dialect.
This is one of Clojure's superpowers.
Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
#39With respect, this topic in particular has been beaten to death. I too liked Clojure when I tried it some years ago (agreed on the composition and data structures; both are _great_). But the real value-add is in the runtime, not the syntax. Java has a solid runtime but it's not yet as good as Erlang's, maybe even not up to the standards of Golang -- I am talking concurrency / parallelism here (for memory management I…
> Programming language syntax scarcely matters. It does to some extent but we the programmers tend to over-romanticize it. The runtime and its properties are the much better thing to optimize for.
But that really depends on what you're doing. For example if I'm not mistaken Amazon was run for a very long time on a Java backend. And so was GMail's backend (and back then GMail's frontend was, IIRC, Java converted to JavaScript using GWT).
And by "early Amazon" and "early GMail", we're already talking about massive scale. It's not as if the JVM got worse since then (as someone commented: a recent addition is that Clojure now use Java's virtual threads) and it's not as if it didn't scale.
So I'd say having Clojure on top of Java (for those using that Clojure: there's also ClojureScript, babashka, etc.) ain't really a problem, as long as you're fine with the occasional Java stacktrace and Java ecosystem (GP mentions that btw: that he's not familiar with Java and that, I think, can be a bit of an issue).
I'm not sure Clojure is about it's syntax: I like the focus on immutability / pure functions and I do really dig the REPL a huge lot. In addition to that something has to be said as to the incredible stability of the language and many of its libraries.
The big value add to me is that I can have a REPL and inspect, in dev (or in prod but that'd be wild), the app I'm working on. And manipulate it: redefining variables and functions etc. And it's not some hacky hot-reloading bolted on as an afterthought kludge: it's a real Lisp REPL. There's value in that IMO.
Re: My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
#40With respect, this topic in particular has been beaten to death. I too liked Clojure when I tried it some years ago (agreed on the composition and data structures; both are _great_). But the real value-add is in the runtime, not the syntax. Java has a solid runtime but it's not yet as good as Erlang's, maybe even not up to the standards of Golang -- I am talking concurrency / parallelism here (for memory management I…
Have you tried Lisp Flavored Erlang [0]? I never got around to trying it out. I used Elixir for a couple of years, building web backends, and I truly loved the experience. I remember wanting to try out LFE but never got around to it before moving on to a different employer/stack.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFE_(programming_language)