Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

clojure.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 120 posts

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#51

Post by thom »

jmcgough wrote: post #8
haolez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it going strong? I'm evaluating it for a new project. I'm considering it together with Clara[0]. However, it does give a vibe that it's not as mainstream as it was before and that the ecosystem is more sparse than what is once was. I'm not trying to troll. I want to choose it. It seems like a good engineering decision to me, but if it's nosediving in popularity and contributors, this might bite me back in the near…

I found myself frustrated a lot when I used it two years ago. A lot of abandoned libraries. There's not a huge ecosystem around it compared to golang and other popular languages, but there's probably enough that it's a viable option if you really want to work with the language.

I know a lot of people are making the case libraries are just finished not abandoned, but your feelings are valid. It’s like investing in a really low yield but dependable bond, when everyone around you is making huge gains on tech stocks. I like libraries that get more featureful over time, but sometimes you watch your friends go broke.

There are opportunity costs too, maybe you can say Spec is perfectly fine but you’d be forgiven for having mixed feelings with a massive codebase built on that in a world where many have moved to Malli or elsewhere.

But let’s also be honest, loads of promising Clojure libraries do get abandoned, not finished. ClojureQL was a brilliant, composable approach to writing SQL queries but never reached its potential and was left in a fairly buggy state. I’m probably four or five Clojure data access libraries on from that in my career now. Om was highly influential but good luck if you made an investment in that. Incanter could have been enormous but failed to reach critical mass and you’d be crazy to pick it up now. There’s ‘core’ stuff like core.logic that feels like a decade old unoptimised proof of concept that didn’t follow up any of the interesting paths it laid down. Heck, I’ve even got code that relies on libraries from Chris Zheng, who quit the scene after getting a deserved dressing down from Rich Hickey after complaining about the Clojure development process.

None of this is a moral failing on the Clojure community, and there’s no reason to be defensive about it. It’s a small ecosystem and it’s very hard to build critical mass. Clojure people often have magpie brains that pull them to work on new things. You’ve got to judge it for yourself.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#52

Post by danieroux »

jmcgough wrote: post #8
haolez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it going strong? I'm evaluating it for a new project. I'm considering it together with Clara[0]. However, it does give a vibe that it's not as mainstream as it was before and that the ecosystem is more sparse than what is once was. I'm not trying to troll. I want to choose it. It seems like a good engineering decision to me, but if it's nosediving in popularity and contributors, this might bite me back in the near…

I found myself frustrated a lot when I used it two years ago. A lot of abandoned libraries. There's not a huge ecosystem around it compared to golang and other popular languages, but there's probably enough that it's a viable option if you really want to work with the language.

This is my favourite example of a not-abandoned library: https://github.com/candera/causatum?tab=readme-ov-file#liven...

"As of this writing (25-Sep-2014) I consider this library alive and well"

... "Update 2017-Oct-16: Still true. :)"

This library has been done-done for a decade now. I used it last week.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#53

Post by bschwindHN »

MarkMarine wrote: post #28

This is a wonderful language I've only just started paying attention to, watching the talks from Rich on YouTube have ruined things I loved (like Either types.) I'm struggling with how to introduce it into my company without recommending my colleagues follow my path of working through 3 books and then watching most of the conj talks from the last 12 years on 1.75x speed, while building a personal project and re-imple…

It's funny because I went the opposite direction - from clojure to Rust, and I feel my programs are more maintainable, easier to re-read code written by myself and others, and runs without needing to bring along a virtual machine.

I do like Rich's talks and agree that static typing can be taken a bit too far though.

ClojureScript in particular is much nicer to work with compared to JavaScript

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#54

Post by regularfry »

gleenn wrote: post #9
jmcgough wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found myself frustrated a lot when I used it two years ago. A lot of abandoned libraries. There's not a huge ecosystem around it compared to golang and other popular languages, but there's probably enough that it's a viable option if you really want to work with the language.

I think there is this misconception that lack of activity on libraries indicates they aren't worth using. But I strongly believe a lot of libraries are just feature complete and bug-free enough to leave them be. The syntax of the language changes so minimally that libraries don't have to change at all after updates. This isn't Javascript where everyone keeps tweaking things over and over again.

The problem this creates is that as a potential consumer I can't tell the difference between "effectively done" and "abandoned, half-done, and about to waste a lot of my time".

I don't see an easy answer to this because having "done" be an available state is extremely attractive, and forcing extra work on the author would be the wrong thing to do.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#55

Post by defyonce »

lelag wrote: post #37
MarkMarine wrote: post #28

This is a wonderful language I've only just started paying attention to, watching the talks from Rich on YouTube have ruined things I loved (like Either types.) I'm struggling with how to introduce it into my company without recommending my colleagues follow my path of working through 3 books and then watching most of the conj talks from the last 12 years on 1.75x speed, while building a personal project and re-imple…

Honestly, maybe don’t. You love Clojure, that’s awesome. But introducing it at your company if it does not have a lisp culture already might not go so well. You say so yourself: lisp dialects like Clojure come with a steep learning curve, and not everyone will appreciate the shift, especially if they're comfortable with the current stack. Forcing it on your team could create frustration, confusion, and a lot of resen…

it is better to have +1 company with Clojure (potentially hiring), than +1 Clojure dev looking for work

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#56

Post by xxmarkuski »

Clojure is great. Brining together Lisp with the Java ecosystem makeand its concurrency model makes it great for building backend system, while still enabling quick changes. One thing that I found noteworthy is that Clujure did not pickup some innovations happening at Java since like version 8, such as Invoke Dynamic in the JVM or streams.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#57

Post by diggan »

_xiaz wrote: post #42
diggan wrote: post #4

Lovely to see add-libs and sync-deps, aren't many (any?) reasons to close down a session at all now. This release feels like it had a very different scope from previous releases, contains a lot of stuff, which is exciting to see! But I hope it doesn't end up like a hairball a few releases down from increase of pace or something.

> But I hope it doesn't end up like a hairball a few releases down from increase of pace or something. Rich Hickey and the rest of the Clojure Team are very careful designers. I wouldn't worry too much

> Rich Hickey and the rest of the Clojure Team are very careful designers. I wouldn't worry too much

I am aware of this, which is why I suppose previous releases haven't included as many features at once as this one. It's this possible change of pace that raised the question in me :)

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#59

Post by wokwokwok »

chr15m wrote: post #41
MarkMarine wrote: post #28

This is a wonderful language I've only just started paying attention to, watching the talks from Rich on YouTube have ruined things I loved (like Either types.) I'm struggling with how to introduce it into my company without recommending my colleagues follow my path of working through 3 books and then watching most of the conj talks from the last 12 years on 1.75x speed, while building a personal project and re-imple…

Every company likes to hear about increased productivity and less bugs, and that's what Clojure/Script gives you. The trade-off is you get less resumes when hiring. The plot twist is the resumes are much higher quality.

Ha.

I personally have sat in a meeting where a clojure enthusiast was explaining how he had quickly built a system.

He could not explain the code he had written only three weeks before.

Clojure suffers heavily from a “less code is good code, write clever code not verbose code” culture.

For newcomers this creates dumpster fires that are quick to create and impossible to maintain.

Anywaaay, long story short: no. It doesn’t.

Specifically, I’ve seen it be a dumpster fire three times.

Perhaps your experience has been different; but you are flat out wrong in your generalisation; and that arrogant attitude has been the root cause of all three failures I have personally had to clean up after.

Re: Clojure 1.12.0 is now available

#60

Post by lebski88 »

MarkMarine wrote: post #28

This is a wonderful language I've only just started paying attention to, watching the talks from Rich on YouTube have ruined things I loved (like Either types.) I'm struggling with how to introduce it into my company without recommending my colleagues follow my path of working through 3 books and then watching most of the conj talks from the last 12 years on 1.75x speed, while building a personal project and re-imple…

I've been at an organization that went from Java to Clojure about 12 years ago. I think there were two main things that allowed us to make the move:

* No one was in love with Java. It was fine but we were doing the whole spring style super verbose Java and it felt like a lot of ceremony to get anything done. There had been an experiment with Scala previously but that hadn't taken off.

* We had a service-oriented architecture which meant we could try Clojure out on a few new services and see how it felt.

We ended up going from 2 services to moving the whole org over really quickly. A lot of excitement built up and people didn't want to be left out. At the end of things only 2 people decided they didn't want to learn Clojure.

A few other things we did:

* Bought loads of books and left them lying around

* Started a Clojure club where we booked an hour a week and did some exercises in Clojure

* Had a big meeting where we convinced everyone that Clojure was worth an experiment

* Brought in 3 consultants to do some Clojure training for everyone

* Probably strong armed everyone into watching simple made easy - it helped that lots of people had already seen it live that year

There are a few talks about it floating around although they are very very old now and I'm not sure they're worth the time!

https://whostolebenfrog.github.io/clojure,/deployments,/clou...

Post reply on HN