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Why I ever wrote Clojure

thesoftwarephilosopher.com

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Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#41

Post by rads »

sbjs wrote: post #35
rads wrote: post #8

Such a low quality article. The whole comment thread is just going to be about the flamebait of "I bet Rich was just really bored". Instead, the author could have listed the reasons they actually "loved it, and by the end I hated it", which would have led to an interesting discussion.

I thought it was self explanatory. It had new idioms I had not yet learned and internalized, so I fully absorbed it. When that was finished, I needed something else to do the same thing with. It's like listening to a song on repeat 10-100 times (depending on the song) when you first hear it. You get everything you can out of it and move on when it's empty.

What was the tipping point where you decided you got everything you could from learning Clojure and it was time to move on?

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#42

Post by slowmovintarget »

zerr wrote: post #39
dunk010 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distinctly remember in one of his talks he said words to the effect of “I wrote corporate C++ and Java for years and eventually realised I had to do something else, or else quit the industry”. So he took a year long sabbatical and created Clojure.

Why not quite the niche though? Clojure doesn't make writing corporate CRUD apps enjoyable.

Incorrect.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#43

Post by slowmovintarget »

froh wrote: post #28

new languages are created to push the boundaries for manageable essential complexity, by reducing "accidental" complexity. clojure's data structures for example enable simpler concurrent work on stupid enterprise data. however. I've seen favorite hot fancy XYZ bit rot in large enterprise code bases. the oh so bored original author long gone. boring architecture documentation missing. business critical underdocumented…

Clojure is burned-by-OOP simplicity, not bored-genius complexity.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#44

Post by epolanski »

zerr wrote: post #39
dunk010 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distinctly remember in one of his talks he said words to the effect of “I wrote corporate C++ and Java for years and eventually realised I had to do something else, or else quit the industry”. So he took a year long sabbatical and created Clojure.

Why not quite the niche though? Clojure doesn't make writing corporate CRUD apps enjoyable.

I don't think the particular niche matters, eventually everything becomes being a mundane job.

I know few people that made it in shiny businesses (Serie A and Champions League players like Fabio Liverani and Simone Pepe, or Massimiliano Rosolino swimming gold metal at Olympics) and they all absolutely either hated or found 99.9% of their career an endless marathon of mundane boring activities.

I'm not saying there aren't plenty of exceptions of people that like their job, and jobs that may make it easier, but it looks to me that most of people find their job mundane and boring most of the time.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#46

Post by daxfohl »

no_wizard wrote: post #19

My biggest contention with the article is around writing enterprise software I find solving business problems exciting. I didn’t really get into this business to purely write code or only work with novel technologies. I got into to empower others to do things they otherwise wouldn’t, couldn’t, or didn’t think to do. To me, the language I work with is such a small slice of the pie. The problems don’t even have to be n…

I've gotten there, but only after about 25 years in the industry. I think when you're just starting out, you should be excited about different technologies and looking for excuses to try them out.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#47

Post by daxfohl »

daveliepmann wrote: post #2

>I suspect this is the real reason Clojure was created, I bet Rich was just really bored. I notice too that a noticeable number of people pick up Clojure because it's new and shiny. As a longtime Clojurian I find that attitude can be disappointing to run into, like when you realize a growing friendship will die because they're not serious about living in your city. I don't claim to know the man but the reasons Rich w…

As verbose as Java is, it was even worse 20 years ago. If Kotlin, or C# 3.5+ were the OOP lingua francas at the time, maybe there would have been less need to create something else.

But still, "why not"? The first "alt-lang" I remember was "boo", on the dotnet platform. IDK if they actually meant to popularize it, but it had some cool features C# (and J#) didn't have, so, why not?

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#48

Post by daxfohl »

runeblaze wrote: post #26
daxfohl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't everyone benefit from those things? I didn't follow the fintech call-out here. Is fintech really that much different from other fields? I worked in it for a couple years and the only big difference I saw is how much of a pain all the regulatory hurdles are.

Yep my phrasing was not the best :X. You might know better ("couple years"). However my anecdotal observation is that the end result is that fintech drifts FP (heavy concurrency + immutability, ledgers and all) than your "average" tech. I genuinely don't know why, maybe correctness guarantees and ledgers are just so important.

FWIW I was mostly on the compliance side, so didn't have all that much direct exposure to the transaction side of things. But from the exposure I did have, I didn't see a huge difference. A transaction is a transaction. And the transactions were at the DB layer, so I wouldn't think the atomicity primitives built into the Clojure language would be all that useful.

Like anything, the middle tier should be largely stateless anyway, so using Clojure atomicity primitives in business logic may even be an anti-pattern.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#49

Post by sbjs »

rads wrote: post #41
sbjs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was self explanatory. It had new idioms I had not yet learned and internalized, so I fully absorbed it. When that was finished, I needed something else to do the same thing with. It's like listening to a song on repeat 10-100 times (depending on the song) when you first hear it. You get everything you can out of it and move on when it's empty.

What was the tipping point where you decided you got everything you could from learning Clojure and it was time to move on?

Can't remember, was like 10 years ago. But basically after I finished mastering the last feature I needed to, probably macros.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#50

Post by dang »

dnoberon wrote: post #25
moonlion_eth wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't this comment have more discussion

Yeah, feel like this should be the grounds enough for a lot of conversation.

Users flagged it, most probably because the cost of such discussion outweighs the benefit.
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