Live data from Hacker News

Elements of Clojure

therepl.net

51–60 of 71 posts

Re: Elements of Clojure

#51
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't fallen. The Clojure community has been growing steadily and continues to grow (it's a great community, I'll add). Things have just settled down since, that's why there are fewer announcement. As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1]. Most Clojure programmers I know (myself included) would not choose to go back to Java. [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019…

As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1]. Not to sound snarky, but that could be interpreted as old clojure projects can't find Clojure programmers.

No, it's not because of that. The reason I think - F# and Clojure are two main FP languages being used in Finance. Fintech companies are known for paying above average salary. Both F# and Clojure are the most paid languages (according to SO surveys of the last few years)

Re: Elements of Clojure

#52
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't fallen. The Clojure community has been growing steadily and continues to grow (it's a great community, I'll add). Things have just settled down since, that's why there are fewer announcement. As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1]. Most Clojure programmers I know (myself included) would not choose to go back to Java. [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019…

Is it growing? It is a difficult metric to quantify, but looking at thing like Github, or Reddit, it seems flat or declining. Clojure initially benefited as the preferred Java escape path, but it seems like that has been supplanted by Kotlin. https://github.com/oprogramador/github-languages#most-failin... https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-language...

Yes, it is growing. Today Clojure hosts more conferences than Rust, Swift, Elm, Erlang, F#, Haskell, Elixir, OCaml, ReasonML and soon the number may exceed number of Scala specific conferences. It will probably never become as popular as Javascript/Typescript or Python and Ruby but it is slowly and steadily growing.

Re: Elements of Clojure

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mystified that not more people are offering remote possibilities when hiring for Clojure. There are some really great people out there, but the likelihood that they live in your neighborhood is low. Geography seems like an arbitrary constraint to me. Nothing about it increases the probability of getting a better candidate.

I beg to differ - Clojure is like specifically made for distributed teams. I have never had such nice experience in other tech stacks when working remotely. There are many more remote Clojure jobs today than non-remote.

You are agreeing with fnordsensei. :)

Re: Elements of Clojure

#54
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most Clojure programmers I know (myself included) would not choose to go back to Java. Thats true. I write clojure for living too. But choice of programming languages in enterprises is not made by programmers.

It is indirectly; if a company has trouble hiring, they might switch up the stack a bit to try and attract new talent. For example, my previous employer (Jet.com) used F# partly because one of the most senior engineers liked it, but also partly because they thought it might attract some tech talent out of the shadows.

I've never heard of any company switching languages because they were having trouble hiring.

Re: Elements of Clojure

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1] That's more an indication of scarcity than anything else. FORTRAN and COBOL programmers are also pretty well compensated. Also, good luck getting any of these jobs.

>Also, good luck getting any of these jobs. When was the last time you've tried? I know a great deal of developers (including myself) working exclusively with Clojure and have never struggled finding a new gig.

I think the Clojure job market is pretty good for senior developers but bad for junior developers. Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless. That could just be a weird situation, but I almost never see any job listings looking for junior developers, and when I do, they tend to be in Europe/Canada rather than the U.S.

Re: Elements of Clojure

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it growing? It is a difficult metric to quantify, but looking at thing like Github, or Reddit, it seems flat or declining. Clojure initially benefited as the preferred Java escape path, but it seems like that has been supplanted by Kotlin. https://github.com/oprogramador/github-languages#most-failin... https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-language...

Yes, it is growing. Today Clojure hosts more conferences than Rust, Swift, Elm, Erlang, F#, Haskell, Elixir, OCaml, ReasonML and soon the number may exceed number of Scala specific conferences. It will probably never become as popular as Javascript/Typescript or Python and Ruby but it is slowly and steadily growing.

I'd attribute Clojure conference success to the passionate fans, but look at the google trend line:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Re: Elements of Clojure

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, good luck getting any of these jobs. When was the last time you've tried? I know a great deal of developers (including myself) working exclusively with Clojure and have never struggled finding a new gig.

I think the Clojure job market is pretty good for senior developers but bad for junior developers. Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless. That could just be a weird situation, but I almost never see any job…

I am not overly familiar with Clojure, but is it possible to be expert at Clojure, and not be able to parlay that into some other JVM language job? It might be a bit depressing, but I would think that one could take a Java job in a pinch if one had one's back against the wall.

Re: Elements of Clojure

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Clojure job market is pretty good for senior developers but bad for junior developers. Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless. That could just be a weird situation, but I almost never see any job…

I am not overly familiar with Clojure, but is it possible to be expert at Clojure, and not be able to parlay that into some other JVM language job? It might be a bit depressing, but I would think that one could take a Java job in a pinch if one had one's back against the wall.

I think anyone who's an expert in any general-purpose programming language can find a way to parlay that into a job, since it's much easier for them to learn another language, but knowing Clojure doesn't help much for learning other JVM languages. My guess is an expert C++ programmer could pick up Java faster than a Clojure programmer.

Re: Elements of Clojure

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a small active community with many abandoned libraries, no killer app, and painful tooling. I like the language in spite of that, but size of community matters. To your point, as a hosted language you can make up Clojure's deficiencies by using Java libraries, but if you aren't a Java developer (or are a disgruntled Java developer) that isn't a great answer. The only question worth asking is whether the langua…

> It has a small active community Wrong. Clojure community is only smaller in comparison to mainstream languages: Java, JS/TS, Python, Ruby, Go. Today it has more conferences than Haskell, F#, OCaml, Elm, Elixir, Erlang. More meetups and more podcasts. Just this year alone there were announcements for Clojure confs in India, Brazil, Canada, Russia and Belgium (and these are just for new ones) > many abandoned librari…

Maybe conferences isn't a great metric there have been a bunch of cancellations like SYNC and Clojure West. People have already mentioned Incanter in this thread, one of many abandoned and out of date libraries. Lacinia is nice, but a killer app? What language doesn't have a GraphQL library? Have many partially supported editors doesn't make better tooling. Clojure still has potential, but by every other metric, besides conferences (

Re: Elements of Clojure

#60
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it growing? It is a difficult metric to quantify, but looking at thing like Github, or Reddit, it seems flat or declining. Clojure initially benefited as the preferred Java escape path, but it seems like that has been supplanted by Kotlin. https://github.com/oprogramador/github-languages#most-failin... https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-language...

I really don't understand why people obsesses over popularity so much. The only question worth asking is whether the language has a big enough community to be sustainable, especially when dealing with a hosted language that leverages the underlying ecosystem. In case of Clojure the answer is unequivocally yes. It's got a large active community around it, and there are many companies of all kinds using it in productio…

Not to mention 25000 pure Clojure libraries to add to those inherited from Java.
Post reply on HN